Hi, Robot

Reading Minds ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 123-138
Author(s):  
Henry M. Wellman

This chapter focuses on children’s perception of and interaction with robots. In this way, it follows from Chapter 8 and its focus on understanding of extraordinary minds. Every year, robots become a larger part of adults’ and children’s lives. They are designed to play games, answer questions, read stories, and even watch children unsupervised. Current research suggests that robots might be effective in these roles for young children but less so with older ones. Because robots play an expanding role in children’s lives, we need an expanding research program to understand child–robot interactions for children in a wide range of ages. The chapter overviews emerging research beginning to study this. It also outlines future studies needed to examine children’s learning from robots, along with the complex relationship between children’s perceptions of robots, experiences with robots, how they treat them, and how those interactions impact children’s social development and their interactions with others.

2021 ◽  
pp. 096100062110071
Author(s):  
Pianran Wang ◽  
Jianhua Xu ◽  
Brian W. Sturm ◽  
Qi Kang ◽  
Yingying Wu

Young children’s perceptions of library services are often ignored when providing library services to this group. In order to reveal young children’s perceptions, grounded theory technique was used to analyze the interview data from 92 young Chinese children. The authors first proposed an integrated model of young children’s perceptions of Chinese public libraries, including the elements of books, physical spaces, rules, and people. Subsequently, the model is compared to the adult experts’ perspectives, revealing that young children could perceive all the experts’ proposed services and functions. Besides, they could perceive rules in libraries. Furthermore, young children were able to convert the abstract library classification index system to perceptible clues. The findings could be used to improve library services to accurately conform to young children’s perspectives.


AERA Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 233285841985323
Author(s):  
Preeti G. Samudra ◽  
Rachel M. Flynn ◽  
Kevin M. Wong

Coviewing media is a practice commonly recommended to parents of young children. However, little is known about how coviewing might scaffold the vocabulary learning of low-income preschoolers. The present study focused on how coviewing educational media influences children’s learning of two different vocabulary associations—auditory-only and audiovisual vocabulary associations. We additionally studied whether children with weaker baseline vocabularies might particularly benefit from coviewing. One hundred twenty-eight low-income preschoolers viewed five educational media clips either with an adult coviewer or alone. Audiovisual and auditory vocabulary associations were then assessed. Results show that coviewing did not support vocabulary learning overall but did specifically support the development of auditory-only vocabulary associations for children with weaker baseline vocabularies. This suggests that coviewing may not provide a ubiquitous benefit but rather predicts learning in the mode of coviewer input (auditory) specifically for the children who need additional supports the most.


Author(s):  
Amy J. Hammond

An experiment was performed to examine adults' perceptions of other adults' and children's perceptions of risk. The differences in how adults assess risk to themselves, to other adults, and to children based on their own perceptions and on the perceptions they believe the “others” will hold for themselves were explored. Results found that adult subjects do judge risk as greater for others than for themselves, particularly for young children. A “superiority bias” was found, such that products were assessed to be more risky for others than others would assess for themselves. Implications of a discrepancy between the perceptions adults assign to children and the perceptions of children themselves is discussed.


2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (7) ◽  
pp. 991-1004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine O. Fritz ◽  
Peter E. Morris ◽  
Debra Nolan ◽  
Jillian Singleton

The benefits of expanding retrieval practice for preschool children were explored in two experiments. In Experiment 1, three groups learned names for six plush toy pigs using expanding retrieval practice, a reward incentive, or a control condition. Reward did not significantly improve learning but retrieval practice doubled recall. In Experiment 2, three groups learned names to soft toys, comparing recall following massed elaborative study with either expanding retrieval practice or expanding re-presentation. Recall was tested after 1 minute, 1 day, and 2 days. A very large effect size ( d = 1.9) indicated the very considerable benefit from expanding retrieval practice over the elaboration condition. Comparison with the re-presentation condition suggested that half of the benefit of expanding retrieval practice came from spaced scheduling and half from retrieval practice. Expanding retrieval practice provides an effective method to improve learning by young children.


2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Boulton-Lewis ◽  
Joanne Brownlee ◽  
Sue Walker ◽  
Charlotte Cobb-Moore ◽  
Eva Johansson

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahesh Srinivasan ◽  
Hugh Rabagliati

Word learning is typically studied as a problem in which children need to learn a single meaning for a new word. According to most theories, children’s learning is itself guided by the assumption that a new word has only one meaning. However, most words in languages are polysemous, having many related and distinct meanings. In this article, we consider the implications of this disjuncture. As we review, current theories predict that children should struggle to learn polysemous words. Yet recent research shows that young children readily learn multiple meanings for words and represent them in ways that are qualitatively similar to adults. Moreover, polysemy may facilitate word learning by allowing children to use their knowledge of familiar meanings of a word to learn its other meanings. These findings motivate a new perspective on word learning that recognizes polysemy as a fundamental feature of language instead of treating it as an outlying case.


2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 1145-1155 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER A. ZAPF ◽  
LINDA B. SMITH

ABSTRACTThis paper reports on partial knowledge in two-year-old children's learning of the regular English plural. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with one kind and its label and then were either presented with two of that same kind (A→AA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (A→AB). The children in A→AA rarely produced the plural. The children in A→AB supplied the singular form of A but children in A→AA did not. Experiment 3 compared the performance of English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children in A→AA with common and novel nouns. The Japanese-speaking children (learning a language without a mandatory plural) supplied the singular form of A but the English-speaking children did not. The findings indicate young children learning English know there is a plural to be learned before they have fully worked out the rules of production or acquired the necessary singular–plural pairs for broad generalization.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tania Lombrozo ◽  
Elizabeth Bonawitz ◽  
Nicole R. Scalise

Young children often endorse explanations of the natural world that appeal to functions or purpose—for example, that rocks are pointy so animals can scratch on them. By contrast, most Western-educated adults reject such explanations. What accounts for this change? We investigated 4- to 5-year-old children’s ability to generalize the form of an explanation from examples by presenting them with novel teleological explanations, novel mechanistic explanations, or no explanations for 5 nonliving natural objects. We then asked children to explain novel instances of the same objects and novel kinds of objects. We found that children were able to learn and generalize explanations of both types, suggesting an ability to draw generalizations over the form of an explanation. We also found that teleological and mechanistic explanations were learned and generalized equally well, suggesting that if a domain-general teleological bias exists, it does not manifest as a bias in learning or generalization.


Author(s):  
Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson ◽  
Sonja Sheridan ◽  
Mikael Hansen

This article aims to investigate young children’s experience of aesthetic activities in preschool. The result is based on preschool teachers’ mapping during a two-week period of what toddlers (1.5 to 3.4 years) are offered or take initiatives themselves to, within the area of aesthetics. The 24 preschools where the mapping was done have been participating in a larger research project called, Children’s early learning. A current study of preschool as an environment for children’s learning (Sheridan, Pramling Samuelsson & Johansson, 2009). This means that we also had data on the quality of the participating preschools, based on ECERS (Harms & Clifford, 1980; Sheridan, 2007), which we linked to children’s experience in aesthetics. The result shows that there is a large variation between the amount and kind of aesthetic activities in preschool that young children can participate in. 


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Campana

Purpose This study aims to offer insights into the presence and nature of an information environment provided for young children to support their learning and explore how an information environment for young children can be characterized. Design/methodology/approach Observations of video-recorded public library storytimes were used to investigate the presence and nature of an information environment for young children’s learning. Findings The observations revealed that storytimes provide a rich, multimodal information environment where information is shared with young children and they are encouraged to interact with it in a variety of ways. The storytime participants take on several different roles that help to foster and sustain the information environment. Originality/value This study tests the applicability of Eisenberg and Small’s (1993) information-based education framework for exploring an information environment and recommends revisions to improve the framework’s effectiveness for characterizing information environments for young children.


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