ArticleFrontiers in psychology2020
A Robot Is Not Worth Another: Exploring Children's Mental State Attribution to Different Humanoid Robots.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Ageing society and the challenge for social robotics: A systematic review of Socially Assistive Robotics for MCI patients.PloS one · 2023Pooled it
- Effectiveness of a Robot-Assisted Psychological Intervention for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2024Trial
- The Impact of Anthropomorphic Eco-Friendly Logos on Consumers' Green Purchase Intention: A Moderated Mediation Model.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- How Do Children Evaluate Scientific Explanations Provided by Digital Voice Assistants, Teachers, and Peers?Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Culture and anthropomorphism towards robots in middle school students: evidence from human-robot interaction.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Synchronous motion predicts enhanced perceived human-robot teamwork.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Children's attribution of mental states to humans and social robots assessed with the Theory of Mind Scale.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Evaluating human perceptions of android robot facial expressions based on variations in instruction styles.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2025Article
- Toward aitiopoietic cognition: bridging the evolutionary divide between biological and machine-learned causal systems.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Review
- A child-robot theater afterschool program can promote children's conceptualization of social robots' mental capacities and engagement in learning.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2025Article
- Factors influencing subjective opinion attribution to conversational robots.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2025Article
- The Minds That Matter: How Robots' Mental Capacities Shape Children's Evaluations and Trust.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Social robots in research on social and cognitive development in infants and toddlers: A scoping review.PloS one · 2024Article
- Opinion attribution improves motivation to exchange subjective opinions with humanoid robots.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2024Article
- Virtual agents and risk-taking behavior in adolescence: the twofold nature of nudging.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The Effects of Social Presence and Familiarity on Children-Robot Interactions.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Development and validation of the Attribution of Mental States Questionnaire (AMS-Q): A reference tool for assessing anthropomorphism.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Toy story or children story? Putting children and their rights at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution.AI & society · 2023Article
- Human-Like Movements of Industrial Robots Positively Impact Observer Perception.International journal of social robotics · 2022Article
- Is Aesthetic Good? A Study on the Aesthetic and Vitality Judgment of Pictorial Representations of the Dead, Saints and Non-Saints.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent technological developments in robotics has driven the design and production of different humanoid robots. Several studies have highlighted that the presence of human-like physical features could lead both adults and children to anthropomorphize the robots. In the present study we aimed to compare the attribution of mental states to two humanoid robots, NAO and Robovie, which differed in the degree of anthropomorphism. Children aged 5, 7, and 9 years were required to attribute mental states to the NAO robot, which presents more human-like characteristics compared to the Robovie robot, whose physical features look more mechanical. The results on mental state attribution as a function of children's age and robot type showed that 5-year-olds have a greater tendency to anthropomorphize robots than older children, regardless of the type of robot. Moreover, the findings revealed that, although children aged 7 and 9 years attributed a certain degree of human-like mental features to both robots, they attributed greater mental states to NAO than Robovie compared to younger children. These results generally show that children tend to anthropomorphize humanoid robots that also present some mechanical characteristics, such as Robovie. Nevertheless, age-related differences showed that they should be endowed with physical characteristics closely resembling human ones to increase older children's perception of human likeness. These findings have important implications for the design of robots, which also needs to consider the user's target age, as well as for the generalizability issue of research findings that are commonly associated with the use of specific types of robots.
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