Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Past research suggests that young children have a bias to believe what they are told so that they often trust an informantregardless of the informants previous accuracy. With the ubiquity of new technology, children regularly come in contactwith non-human agents such as robots, yet little is known how children are trusting and thus willing to learn from theseartificial beings. In our study, 3.5- to 5.5-year-old children (N=120) watched a single informant (either a robot NAO ora human adult) name familiar objects either accurately or inaccurately. The same informant subsequently tested childrenon their willingness to accept novel labels for novel objects provided. While children trusted the accurate robot and theaccurate human to the same extent, they were less likely to accept information from the inaccurate robot than the inaccuratehuman. This suggests that preschoolers may not readily extend their trust bias to robots as informants.