Theory of Robot Mind: False Belief Attribution to Social Robots in Children With and Without Autism

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Yaoxin Zhang¹  Wenxu Song²  Zhenlin Tan²  Yuyin Wang³  Cheuk Man Lam⁴  Sio Pan Hoi¹  Qianhan Xiong¹  Jiajia Chen²  Li Yi¹ 

[1] School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University;South China Normal University;Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-sen University;Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences;Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology

关键词: autism spectrum disorder;    social robot;    false belief;    children;    theory of mind;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01732

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

This study aims to probe how children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD) attribute false belief to a social robot and predict its action accordingly. Twenty 5- to 7-year-old children with ASD and 20 age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) children participated in two false belief tasks adapted for robot settings (change-of-location task and the unexpected-contents task). The results showed that most TD children are capable of attributing false belief to the social robot, that is, they could infer higher level mental states in robots, which extends our understanding in TD children’s perception and cognition on social robots. Conversely, children with ASD still show difficulty in interpreting robots’ mental states compared to their TD peers, which would greatly interfere with their interactions and communications with social robots and might impact on efficiency of robot-based intervention and education approaches. This group difference in attributing false belief to social robots could not be explained by the different perception and categorization of the robot. Our study implies that although children with ASD appear to be highly attracted by social robots, they still have difficulty in understanding mental states when socially interacting with robots, which should be taken into consideration when designing the robot-based intervention approach targeting to improve social behaviors of ASD.

【 授权许可】

CC BY