LAIDEN - Interacting with Robots and AI

The perception of agency and the way we explain an agent behavior play a role in the interaction with agentic things, like robotic object and intelligent playthings. Children easily imbue robotic objects and playthings with agency and explain their behavior on psychological term attributing intelligence relying on agency perception. However, human robot interaction researchers and practitioners often do not tackle in the design process how children make sense of a robot, its agency and how children explain a robot's behavior and intelligence. In this talk, I will shed light on these phenomena and their implications for child-interactions. I will argue that responsible human-centred design should play a more prominent role in the human-robot interaction design cycle to understand how children perceive a robot's agency and explain a robot's behavior.