Children judge robots and computers based on social contingency, but little is known about
how children treat semi‐socially contingent devices like digital voice assistants. This study …

As children increasingly interact with digital voice assistants, it is important to know whether
they treat these devices as reliable information sources. Two studies investigated children's …

An examination of children's causal reasoning capacities and how those capacities serve as
the foundation of their scientific thinking. Young children have remarkable capacities for …

From infancy, humans have the ability to distinguish animate agents from inert objects, and
preschoolers map biological and mechanical insides to their appropriate kinds. However …

Thinking of the world in mechanistic terms—how things work—is both cognitively natural
and motivating for humans from the preschool years onward. Mechanisms have distinct …

Children frequently use Google to answer their questions, yet what they think about Google's
capacity and limitations is unclear. This study explores children's beliefs about Google's …

Two studies ask whether scaffolded children (n= 243, 5–6 years and 9–10 years) recognize
that assistance is needed to learn to use complex artifacts. In Study 1, children were asked …

The current investigation examines children's (N= 61; 4-to 8-year old) learning about a novel
machine in a local history museum. Parent–child dyads were audio-recorded as they …

Mechanistic complexity is an important property that affects how we interact with and learn
from artifacts. Although highly complex artifacts have only recently become part of human …

When assessing the quality of a machine, people might consider the machine's outputs—
how well it serves its function. Alternatively, people might also consider the efficiency of the …