Dictator Game with a Robot in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Sharing is Predicted by Positive Attributions Towards the Agent
Résumé
The increasing use of robots for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), with the notable aim of supporting the development of social skills, prompts the question of the extent to which children with ASD interact with robots as with social agents. In the literature, resource-sharing tasks (e.g. dictator game) have already been used to study the perception of robots in typically developing children, but few studies have focused on sharing in children with ASD. 38 children aged 9 to 13 (28 typically developing children and 10 children with ASD) played the dictator game with a humanoid robot NAO and a human experimenter, in counterbalanced order. They also answered an adapted version of the Godspeed questionnaire designed to measure anthropomorphism. The results indicate that the quantity of shared resources is better predicted by the good personality score, which reflects the attribution of positive traits to the agent, than by the type of development: the higher the score, the greater the number of resources given by the participant. Contrary to our initial assumption, children with ASD tend to give fewer resources to the robot than to the human, unlike TD children who give the same amount to both agents. In the human experimenter condition, children with ASD and neurotypical children share similarly. Post-hoc analyses, however, indicate an effect of development type on good personality scores, with lower scores for ASD than neurotypical children. The attribution of positive traits to the agent could be the mediating variable between development type and sharing behavior.