Suchergebnisse

Today's children grow up in an environment that is increasingly characterized by digital voice assistants (DVAs), such as Alexa, Siri, or the Google Assistant. This paper argues that any attempt to investigate children's interactions with, and perceptions of, DVAs should be based on the theoretical grounds of an ontological framework that considers children's genuine understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to be a machine. Based on focus groups and a gamified data collection design, our empirical inquiry applied qualitative methods to explore primary school children's (<i>n =</i>27, age range: 6–10 years, average age: 8.6 years) open interactions with DVAs. In particular, our focus was on how DVAs were embedded in children's general ontological belief system, and how children interpreted certain aspects of DVAs' interactive capabilities as being genuinely humanoid or non-humanoid. On the one hand, our findings suggest that children's interactions with DVAs might be more an end in itself than a means to an end, meaning that children primarily interact with DVAs for the sake of engaging excitement instead of using the devices' utilitarian functionalities. On the other hand, we found that children in our sample held firm ontological beliefs about the distinct nature of humans and machines, whilst interpreting certain aspects of DVAs' interactive capabilities as being genuinely humanoid (e.g., non-responsiveness, delayed responses, inaccuracy) and non-humanoid (e.g., permanent responsiveness, promptness, accuracy, limited conversational capacities, lack of common sense, standardized responses) at the same time.

AbstractDigital Voice Assistants (DVAs) have become a ubiquitous technology in today's home and childhood environments. Inspired by (Bernstein and Crowley, J Learn Sci 17:225–247, 2008) original study (n = 60, age 4–7 years) on how children's ontological conceptualizations of life and technology were systematically associated with their real-world exposure to robotic entities, the current study explored this association for children in their middle childhood (n = 143, age 7–11 years) and with different levels of DVA-exposure. We analyzed correlational survey data from 143 parent–child dyads who were recruited on 'Amazon Mechanical Turk' (MTurk). Children's ontological conceptualization patterns of life and technology were measured by asking them to conceptualize nine prototypical organically living and technological entities (e.g., humans, cats, smartphones, DVAs) with respect to their biology, intelligence, and psychology. Their ontological conceptualization patterns were then associated with their DVA-exposure and additional control variables (e.g., children's technological affinity, demographic/individual characteristics). Compared to biology and psychology, intelligence was a less differentiating factor for children to differentiate between organically living and technological entities. This differentiation pattern became more pronounced with technological affinity. There was some evidence that children with higher DVA-exposure differentiated more rigorously between organically living and technological entities on the basis of psychology. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study exploring children's real-world exposure to DVAs and how it is associated with their conceptual understandings of life and technology. Findings suggest although psychological conceptualizations of technology may become more pronounced with DVA-exposure, it is far from clear such tendencies blur ontological boundaries between life and technology from children's perspective.