Children and robots: future friends?

In the future, humans will come into contact more and more frequently with 'social robots' - robots designed specifically for interactions with people. Children are increasingly likely to encounter such robots in various environments, including in schools or in healthcare situations, and the development of child-robot relationships is therefore an emerging area for study. UvA researcher Caroline van Straten has spent the last few years studying this new type of relationship. She will defend her PhD thesis on the topic on 12 November at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Social robots have a wide range of possible societal applications. Prior research has shown that children often think of them as potential friends, meaning that these robots could, for instance, be used to accompany hospitalised children at times when a human presence is not possible. Van Straten: 'We know child-robot relationships might be part of our future, but there are many questions, both theoretical and practical, surrounding the issue that still need to be addressed.' Van Straten first worked on the development and validation of three scales that measure children's closeness toward, trust in, and perceived level of social support from a robot. The scales are intended to help future researchers, as well as practitioners (such as healthcare professionals), to investigate children's psychological and social responses to the social robots that are becoming part of their daily environments. She then moved on to conduct a series of experimental studies, examining the individual interactions between primary school-age children and a robot. Transparency about social robots