Do Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Show Selective Trust in Social Robots?
Kids with autism can tell accurate robots from inaccurate ones, so robots are usable tools—just expect modest trust levels.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Chen et al. (2024) watched kids with autism decide which robot to trust.
Some robots gave right answers, others gave wrong ones.
The team compared trust choices to kids who were developing typically.
What they found
Children with autism picked the accurate robot more often than the wrong one.
Their trust was lower overall than their typical peers, but the skill was still there.
How this fits with other research
EGranieri et al. (2020) pooled 18 trials and found robot social-skills training works as well as live teaching.
Marino et al. (2020) later showed robot CBT boosted emotion skills in preschoolers.
Cullinan et al. (2001) seems to disagree: older autistic youth struggled to judge rude social talk.
The gap is about age and task. The 2001 teens weighed tricky verbal scenes; the 2024 kids simply tagged which robot was right.
Why it matters
You can use social robots to teach or assess children with autism, but plan for slightly weaker buy-in.
Start with short, clear trials where the robot is always right, then fade in errors as the child learns to check.
Track trust choices as a data point, just like correct responses.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
PURPOSE: Previous researches suggest that social robots can facilitate the learning of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by enhancing their interests, engagement, and attention. However, there is limited understanding regarding whether children with ASD can learn directly from the testimony of social robots and whether they can remain vigilant based on the perceived accuracy of these robots. Therefore, the present study was conducted to examine whether children with ASD demonstrated selective trust towards social robots. METHODS: Twenty-nine children with ASD between ages of 4-7 years, and 38 typically-developing (TD) age and IQ-matched peers participated in classic selective trust tasks. During the tasks, they learned the names of novel objects from either a pair of social robots or a pair of human informants, where one informant had previously been established as accurate and the other inaccurate. RESULTS: Children with ASD trusted information from an accurate social robot over an inaccurate one, similar to their performance with human informants. However, compared to TD children, children with ASD exhibited lower levels of selective trust regardless of the type of informants they learned from. CONCLUSIONS: Our study suggests that children with ASD can selectively trust and acquire knowledge from social robots, shedding light on the potential use of social robots in supporting individuals with ASD.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2024 · doi:10.1016/j.chb.2019.04.008