Children’s Knowledge and Imaginary About Robots

"This study regards a survey about robots that we administered to a sample of 704 children of elementary and secondary schools in two cities of the region Friuli Venezia Giulia (IT)—Udine and Pordenone—, a region on the border with Austria and Slovenia. [...] in the present study we will examine some of the main facets of the representations shared by children and pre-teens: RQ1 Cognitive facets: what are the main characteristics of robots or social robots perceived by children? RQ2 Pragmatic facets: What do children think that a robot does/does not, and what they believe they can/cannot do with it? RQ3 Images: What are the prototypes of robots to which they have been socialized by visual media? RQ4 Communicative system: How does (self-reported) exposure to visual media interact with cognitive and pragmatic facets of the social representations of robots? With these research questions, we aimed to advance the understanding of how robots are actually conceptualized by children, whether and how they are socialized to consensual knowledge about robots. (Fortunati et al., 2015, pp. 687-688)