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This paper describes an investigation of student perceptions of the cognitive and affective capabilities of four robots that have a decreasing degree of morphological human likeness. We showed and illustrated the robots (i.e., InMoov, Padbot, Joy Robot and Turtlebot) to 62 students. After showing the students each of these robots, and explaining their main features and capabilities, we administered a fill-in questionnaire to the students. Our main hypothesis was that the perception of a robot's cognitive and affective capabilities varied in correspondence with their appearance and in particular with their different degree of human likeness. The main results of this study indicate that the scores attributed to the cognitive and emotional capabilities of these robots are not modulated correspondingly to their different morphological similarity to humans. Furthermore, overall, the scores given to all of these robots regarding their ability to explicate mental functions are low, and even lower scores are given to their ability to feel emotions. There is a split between InMoov, the robot which has the highest degree of human likeness, and all of the others. Our results also indicate that: (1) morphological similarity of a robot to humans is not perceived automatically as such by observers, which is not considered a value in itself for the robot; and (2) even at lower levels of robot–human likeness, an uncanny valley effect arises but is quite mitigated by curiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate on children's knowledge and imaginary about robots. To do so, we administered to 704 children from 17 classes of 8 elementary and secondary schools, a survey with close and open questions about their conceptualization of robots. To carry out this study we took as point of reference the theoretical framework of social representations. The main results are that children evaluate toys, robots and human-beings as significantly different on all the characteristics considered. More than toys, robots have mechanical movements, they move, are more intelligent than toys but they do not keep company to them. By contrast, human beings are perceived by children starting from their corporeity: they eat and sleep, move by themselves, are intelligent and speak, keep eye-contact and company. However, children complain about the fact that human beings do not play with them. The imaginary about robots that children receive from media is characterized by anthropomorphic shapes, bodies and by human-like cognitions, feelings and behavior. The more examples of visual products with robots children are able to evoke, the higher they evaluate robots on all human-like characteristics (e.g. it looks into my eyes). Hence, the tension between imaginary and knowledge can be confounding because the human-like features of fictional robots are more advanced than those reachable by the factual ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]