Identifying Differences in Social Responsiveness among Preschoolers Interacting with or Watching Social Robots

We describe experiments performed with a large number of preschool children (ages 1.5 to 4 years) in a two-task eye tracking experiment and a human-robot interaction experiment. The resulting data of mostly neuro-typical children forms a baseline with which to compare children with autism, allowing us to further characterize the autism phenotype. Eye tracking task results indicate a strong preference for a humanoid robot and a social being (a four year old girl) over other robot types. Results from the human-robot interaction task, a semi-structured play interaction between child and robot, showed we can cluster participants based on social distances and other social responsiveness metrics.