Considering the effects of gender in child-robot interaction studies: comment on Srinivasan, et Al. (2013)

Using a pretest-posttest design, Srinivasan, et al. (2013 ) found that a period of interaction between children and an Isobot humanoid robot improved performance on standardized measures of imitation, planning, and execution of motor behaviors. The authors conducted their study with 15 typically developing children (9 boys, 6 girls) and 1 boy with autism. All participants were between the ages of 4 and 7 years. While considerations of gender expectations, norms, and appearance are now considered critical to social interactions between humans and robots by most researchers in the field of human-robot interactions, Srinivasan et al. did not consider these effects. This paper proposes that gender could have significant effects on the results of future work conducted in this area.