ABSTRACT
We conducted an empirical study to co-design a social robot with children to bring about long-term behavioural changes. As a case study, we focused our efforts to create a social robot to promote handwashing in community settings while adhering to minimalistic design principles. Since cultural views influence design preferences and technology acceptance, we selected forty children from different socio-economic backgrounds across India as informants for our design study. We asked the children to design paper mock-ups using pre-cut geometrical shapes to understand their mental models of such a robot. The children also shared their feedback on the eight resulting different conceptual designs of minimalistic caricatured social robots. Our findings show that children had varied expectations of the robot's emotional intelligence, interactions, and social roles even though it was being designed for a specific context of use. The children unequivocally liked and trusted anthropomorphized caricatured designs of everyday objects for the robot's morphology. Based on these findings, we present our recommendations for the physical and interaction features of a minimalist social robot assimilating the children's inputs and social robot design principles grounded in prior research. Future studies will examine the children's interactions with a built prototype.
ABSTRACT
We address three issues: (1) There is a need for a comprehensive multidisciplinary understanding of teaching; (2) teaching is a natural cognitive ability for humans; and (3) there is a need to incorporate the mentalistic and cultural approaches to teaching. We suggest certain research studies that can help deepen our understanding of the cognition of teaching.
Subject(s)
Aptitude , Cognition , HumansABSTRACT
We propose that in addition to children's requests for word names being a reflection of an understanding of the referential nature of words, they may also be requests for adult's teaching. These possible requests for teaching among toddlers, along with other indications, suggest that teaching may be a natural cognition that may be related to the development of theory of mind.
ABSTRACT
Factors influencing high school and university students' abilities to solve a conditional proposition were examined. Ninety-four male and female Ss were administered a directed or nondirected form of questioning for the selection task. The classic task involves presenting four cards (red, blue, 5, 7) with a conditional proposition rule "Every card with red on one side has 7 on the other" and the instructions to select the cards that would show the rule to be true or false. Three tasks were administered (A, B, C) allowing an analysis of transfer effects between tasks. Task A comprised two combinations of conjunctions of p and q and their negations, task B had four, and task C had eight. It was found that (a) the number of combinations did not contribute to task difficulty, (b) the form of presenting information about what is on the other side of a card influenced task difficulty, and
