Comparison of Children's Behavior toward Sony's Robotic Dog AIBO and a Real Dog: A Pilot Study

A comparison of children’s behavior toward Sony’s robotic dog AIBO™ (ERS-210) and a similar sized live dog was made over time. Fourteen children between three and six years of age from a kindergarten and a pre-school play group in Zurich, Switzerland, were visited once a week for eleven weeks with the live dog and subsequently for eleven weeks with AIBO. We investigated the children’s spatial proximity toward AIBO and the live dog, and the rate of stroking and touching, the overall rate of interactions, and the rate of laughing in the presence of AIBO and the live dog. The children refused to participate in 18.2% of the sessions with the live dog and in 30.5% of the sessions with AIBO. Children who participated initiated approaches to AIBO significantly more often than to the live dog over the observation period. In contrast, there was no significant difference between the live dog and AIBO initiating the very first contact, even though the live dog approached the childr en 24 times in 126 sessions, while AIBO approached the children only ten times in 107 sessions. The children tended to interact more with AIBO than with the dog. For example, AIBO was touched more often than the dog and there was also less laughter with the dog than with AIBO, but these differences were not significant. In contrast, the dog was stroked significantly more often than AIBO. AIBO started to play ball 44 times whereas the dog only started to play once. That the dog did not often play with a ball, whereas AIBO did, may have played an important role because the children liked this characteristic. That children touched and interacted more with AIBO could be because dogs are widespread in their society and therefore sometimes taken for granted. Nevertheless, 10 out of 14 children said they preferred the dog, three said both, and only one preferred AIBO. Because of the small sample size, strong conclusions can not be drawn from this study, but it may open the door for further research on human–pet and human–robot social interactions

Singly living people and their cats: a study of human mood and subsequent behavior.

We sought to examine how cat owners’ moods correlated with subsequent interactions with their cats. Such a relationship has not been previously documented. Data from 47 women and 49 men living alone with their cats were collected. Participants were visited at their homes for one two-hour session each. Approximately five minutes before and after the observation period, the owners filled out a standard questionnaire (EWL, list of adjectives) to indicate their current mood. The EWL allowed the authors to later assign owner moods to one or more of 14 sub-scales. In this study, results on correlates of moods at the beginning and during the subsequent first half hour of interactions are presented. Multiple regression analyses showed that related mood sub-scales, e.g. anxiety and depressiveness, can influence human behavior in different directions, and that bipolar mood sub-scales, e.g. introvertedness and extrovertedness, do not necessarily work in opposite directions. Four human behaviors were related to mood: intents to interact, starts of interactions, and approaches and vocalizations while interacting. While the start of an interaction was influenced by eight different mood sub-scales, the others mentioned were only related to four sub-scales at most. The only recorded behavior of the cat that was significantly correlated with the owner’s mood was approaches to the owner within an ongoing interaction