This review article examines the extant literature on animism and anthropomorphism in infants and young children. A substantial body of work indicates that both infants and young children have a broad concept of what constitutes a sentient agent and react to inanimate objects as they do to people in the same context. The literature has also revealed a developmental pattern in which anthropomorphism decreases with age, but social robots appear to be an exception to this pattern.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the target article, Clark and Fischer argue that little is known about children's perceptions of social robots. By reviewing the existing literature we demonstrate that infants and young children interact with robots in the same ways they do with other social agents. Importantly, we conclude children's understanding that robots are artifacts (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPast work has demonstrated infants' robust statistical learning across visual and auditory modalities. However, the specificity of representations produced via visual statistical learning has not been fully explored. The current study addressed this by investigating infants' abilities to identify previously learned object sequences when some object features (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPast research has shown a discrepancy in young infants' use of height information in occlusion and containment events-a pattern typically accounted for by event categorization and rule learning. Broadening these theories, the present experiment examined the role of comparison in young infants' reasoning about physical events. We rotated a typical setup of a top-open container 90 degrees such that the opening now faced the side.
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