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Updated: Jul 10, 2026

A View of Their Own: Capturing the Egocentric View of Infants and Toddlers with Head-Mounted Cameras
Published on: October 5, 2018
Socialization between toddlers and robots at an early childhood education center
Fumihide Tanaka1, Aaron Cicourel, Javier R Movellan
1Institute for Neural Computation, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0523, USA. boom@mplab.ucsd.edu
Abstract:
A state-of-the-art social robot was immersed in a classroom of toddlers for >5 months. The quality of the interaction between children and robots improved steadily for 27 sessions, quickly deteriorated for 15 sessions when the robot was reprogrammed to behave in a predictable manner, and improved in the last three sessions when the robot displayed again its full behavioral repertoire. Initially, the children treated the robot very differently than the way they treated each other. By the last sessions, 5 months later, they treated the robot as a peer rather than as a toy. Results indicate that current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialization with human toddlers for sustained periods of time and that it could have great potential in educational settings assisting teachers and enriching the classroom environment.
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