What Are You Talking To? Understanding Children's Perceptions Toward Conversational Agents

• In Event: Designing Innovative and Meaningful Learning Experience

Abstract

Conversational agents (CAs) have the potential to become valuable sources of informal learning at home, providing opportunities for children to practice their school-readiness skills through fun learning experiences. While many CAs are designed to simulate human-to-human communications, we know very little about children’s perceptions to CAs, particularly whether children attribute human properties to non-human CAs. To fill this void, this study seeks to investigate whether children view CAs as possessing human-like cognitive, psychological, and behavioral properties. Children tended to believe that CAs had high cognitive and psychological capabilities, while children were less likely to attribute behavioral properties to the CA. The findings may provide insights on the future design of CAs to support children’s learning.

Authors

• Ying Xu, University of California - Irvine

• Tran Hoang, University of California, Irvine

• Branda Tian Sun, University of California - Irvine

• Mark Warschauer, University of California - Irvine