Modified items

Language is learned through social interactions, in which gaze has a special role because it can be used to guide the attention and reference objects easily. Children, starting from very early ages, are also very good at utilizing gaze to map labels to referenced objects. To achieve language teaching robots, we need to understand how these functions of gaze can be implemented most efficiently. To this aim, we allowed children to interact with a social robot to learn the labels of several objects in a naturalistic setting. In some trials the child guided the gaze and chose the object to be learned while the robot was following and in the others they changed the roles and robot guided the gaze and decided on the object to be learned. We measured how much children actually followed the robot’s gaze and how many words they learned in these two conditions, referred to as active and passive learning conditions, respectively. The results indicate that although children followed the robot’s gaze and learned words successfully, there were no meaningful differences inword learning between the two conditions. The rate of gaze following and time spent looking at the robot did not influence word learning, either. The implications of these results for use of robots in educational settings are further discussed.

Developmental research utilizes various different methodologies and measures to study the cognitive development of young children; however, the reliability and validity of such measures have been a critical issue in all areas of research practices. To address this problem, particularly in the area of research on infants’ interests, we examined the convergent validity of previously reported measures of children’s interests in natural object categories, as indexed by (1) parents’ estimation of their child’s interest in the categories, (2) extrinsic (overt choices in a task), (3) intrinsic (looking time toward objects), and (4) physiological (pupil dilation) responses to objects of different categories. Additionally, we also examined the discriminant validity of all the aforementioned measures against the well-established and validated measure of parents’ estimations of children’s vocabulary knowledge. Children completed two tasks: (a) an eye-tracking task, where they were presented with images from a range of defined categories, which collected indices of looking time and pupillary activity; (b) a sticker-choice task, where they were asked to choose between two sticker-images from two different categories belonging to the range of categories assessed in the previous task. Parents completed two questionnaires to estimate (i) their child’s interests and (ii) vocabulary knowledge in the categories presented. We first analyzed the discriminant validity between the two parent measures, and found a significant positive association between them. Our successive analyses showed no strong or significant associations between any of our measures, apart from a significant positive association between children’s looking time and parents’ estimations of children’s vocabulary knowledge. From our findings, we conclude that measures of infants’ interests thus far may not have sufficient reliability to adequately capture any potential relationship between these measures, or index different components of interest in young children. We suggest next steps for further validation studies in infant research.