Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Investigating folk conceptions of choice and constraints havebeen problematic given that human actions are rarelyconsidered constrained. In this paper, we utilize humanoidrobots (more clearly influenced by determined programming)to empirically test children’s developing concepts of choiceand action. Using a series of agency attribution and choiceprediction tasks, we examined whether children differentiatefree will abilities between robots and humans. Resultsindicated that 5–7-year-old children similarly attributed theability to choose to both a robot and human child. However,for moral scenarios, participants considered the robot’s actionsto be more constrained than the human. These findingsdemonstrate that children appear to hold a nuancedunderstanding of choice across agents and across context.