This week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science includes a paper describing how toddlers bonded with a robot. Researchers at UC-San Diego placed a humanoid robot in a day care center for five months. And what they found is that the children seemed to bond and socialize with the robot when it was responsive to their actions (e.g., giggling when a toddler touched its head [mpeg movie]). By the end of the five months, the researchers report that the kids treated the robot more like another child than they did a toy.
-Greg Dahlmann
(via)
photo from the paper by Tanaka, et al
Earlier on blog.bioethics.net:
+ Robots Are a Soldier’s Best Friend