May 25, 2000
What Do You Mean, `It's Just Like a Real Dog'?
As Robot Pets and Dolls Multiply, Children React in New Ways to Things That Are `Almost Alive'
By KATIE HAFNER
n the 1930's, when the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget
quizzed children to find out if they could tell the difference between
living creatures and inanimate objects, he concluded that they defined life
by figuring out which objects could move by themselves, without an outside
push or pull.
Tony Cenicola for The New York Times
MOOD SWINGS A matrix of sensors and chips allows My Real Baby, made by Hasbro, to interact with people. At first, it simply stares and coos. After the doll is played with, it asks for things, and over time, it forms sentences.
In the last 20 years or so, that particular theory of Piaget's has
been almost completely overturned by research showing that young children
are not fooled by things like garage doors that move by remote control.
That is, children can tell the difference between animals and machines even
if the machines appear to move by themselves.
Now children are encountering a new category of objects, things
that seem to possess intentions, preferences and other characteristics
previously reserved for living beings.
What do children think about what it means to be alive? And at
what ages can children distinguish mechanical objects from real animals or
people? Research into these questions is still in its earliest stages.
There was a flurry of interest in children's reactions when Tamagotchis,
virtual pets from Japan, first appeared a few years ago and then started
dying on their young owners. But the topic is attracting more attention now
as seemingly intelligent toys and other robots appear on the market in
increasing variety and numbers.
Tiger Toys, maker of the chatty, needy Furby, will soon introduce
Shelby, a talking clam that does many of the things Furby does. Tiger also has a
new robot dog, Poo-Chi, on toy store shelves. Panasonic is testing a
robotic cat for isolated old people. And Hasbro, with help from artificial
intelligence experts, has developed an animatronic doll that not only says
''ba-ba'' and makes babylike facial expressions but can also mimic human
expressions in other ways.
''The proliferation of virtual pets is raising new questions about
what kinds of relationships seem appropriate to have with nonbiological
objects,'' said Prof. Sherry Turkle, a professor and psychoanalyst who
studies the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. ''This is about a new kind of relationship that we don't know
enough about. We need to continue to study this very carefully.''
Professor Turkle, who studies the relationships between computers
and people, is among the first researchers to stake a claim in this fertile
new area. For the past two years, she and her research assistant, Jennifer
Audley, have studied virtual pets, like Tamagotchis and electronic dolls
like Furbies. They are trying to understand how interacting with these pet
impersonators - what Professor Turkle calls ''relational artifacts'' -
affects the way people think about their human identity.
In a research project still in its early stages, Professor Turkle
and Ms. Audley have visited after-school centers in the Boston area to
watch the ways children 5 to 10 years old play with Furbies. They have also
sent Furbies home with children and asked the children and their parents to
keep diaries of the interactions.
Again and again, Ms. Audley said, the researchers have asked the
children: ''Is it alive? Is it like a real pet? Does it know you?''
"Strikingly," Ms. Audley said, "often the
answer they settled on was, 'It's not alive in
a human or animal kind of way, but in a
Furby kind of way.' "
Watching children assign personality and
emotion to toys is nothing new for children,
but this category of "sort of alive" breaks
new ground. It is showing up more and more
as a first generation of children plays with
interactive toys that need attention and nurturing.
Asia Kepka for The New York Times
INTERACTIVE RESEARCH Sherry Turkle, right, and her assistant Jennifer Audley, are visiting after-school centers to watch how children play with their Furbys.
"When a doll of 10 years ago said, 'I love
you,' " Professor Turkle said, "the children
knew that there was a little tape recorder
inside. The language did not come from a
relationship of nurturance, of there being a
sense that a consciousness internal to the
doll was processing the quality of the relationship between child and doll."
An emerging class of dolls and toys is
designed to give exactly that sense.
Hasbro's $100 animatronic infant, called
My Real Baby, will be in toy stores in
November. The doll, which Hasbro developed with the iRobot Corporation of Somerville, Mass., is a complex matrix of sensors
and chips. The result is an object that mimics some of a real child's moods and needs.
To be put to sleep, it must be laid down or
rocked. If it is tickled, it giggles.
It seems to go beyond another product
from Hasbro coming out in August: eSpecially My Barney, which connects to a computer so a child or parent can download
activities like songs and games for the toy to
The doll, which does not have a serial
cable, develops over time. When it is first
taken out of the box, it simply stares and
coos. After the doll is played with for a
while, it starts asking for things, like its
bottle. Over time, the baby starts to form
more complete sentences.
While designing the doll, toy makers at
Hasbro hired Dr. Gar Roper, a child psychologist in Fairfield, Conn., to observe little
girls as they played with it. He noticed that
the unpredictability of the doll's responses
confused the children but also fascinated
Dr. Roper said the girls seemed to consider the doll more alive than other dolls.
"They seemed to be aware that this was a
middle ground of some kind," he said.
"They desperately wanted to hold it, but
they were very uncertain of how to hold it.
They held it very gently, with uncertain
But Prof. Alison Gopnik, a developmental
psychologist at the University of California
at Berkeley and co-author of "The Scientist
in the Crib: Minds, Brains and How Children Learn" (William Morrow, 1999), cautioned against drawing hasty conclusions
from such behavior.
While it may be true that the children
pretended that the doll was alive, Professor
Gopnik said, "children behave as if practically everything is alive when they're engaged in pretend play. That in itself doesn't
mean they're confused about what's alive
and what isn't."
Prof. Susan Gelman, a psychologist at the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor,
agreed that even very young children could
make a distinction between animals like
dogs and inanimate objects like chairs.
"But do they maintain such a distinction
even when confronted with creatures that
defy our usual expectations," she said, "that
present what seems to be a fuzzy boundary
between animals and objects?"
Professor Gelman agreed with Professor
Turkle that the new digital dolls coming on
the market bent the familiar boundaries
between the animate and the inanimate.
"By looking at lively, responsive robotic
creatures," she said, "researchers can test
the boundaries of some of our most fundamental concepts in very new and provocative ways.
"If it turns out that robots pose difficulties that self-moving machines do not, then
this would be very interesting indeed, suggesting that maybe the social, interactive
features are particularly central and salient
Then there is the question of electronic
death. The Tamagotchi, the palm-size
screen character from Japan that was very
popular a few years ago, demanded continual care and feeding, and it responded to the
quality of care. But no matter how attentive
its owner, Tamagotchis either died or
sprouted wings after a couple of weeks or so,
often prompting gloom and guilt.
Furbys evoked similar emotions. Some
children panicked when the toys broke, a
sign to their small owners that the pseudopets had died untimely deaths.
Ms. Audley tells of midnight calls from
frantic parents whose children were beside
themselves because their Furby had suddenly gone on the blink. "I would rush over
to the house with a new Furby, and every
single time, the child showed no interest in
the new one," Ms. Audley recalled.
"They gave lots of indications that they
felt betrayed, taken in and fooled. It had
revealed its nature as a machine and they
felt embarrassed and angry. They were
totally unwilling to invest that kind of emotional relationship in an object again."
Children are not the only ones grappling
with the new world of lifelike objects.
"We are finding ourselves in a different
world from the old artificial-intelligence debates in which researchers argued about
whether machines could be really intelligent," Professor Turkle said. "The new
objects sidestep arguments about what is
inherent in the machines and play instead
on what they evoke in us."
In that vein, Panasonic is currently testing a furry robotic cat called Tama and a
robotic teddy bear called Kuma, which are
intended to provide companionship to elderly people; each is expected to cost about
$500. Tama and Kuma react to touch and
sound and can be programmed to say a
number of things, like reminders to take
Paul Liao, chief technology officer in Panasonic's United States office, emphasized
that unlike Sony's $2,500 Aibo robotic dog --
which wanders around the room and chases
balls and even lifts its leg to scratch -- the
Panasonic creatures were not intended as
And what about creatures that seem to be
alive but immortal? Professor Turkle said
one woman told her that Aibo was better
than a real dog because it would not die
suddenly and plunge its owner into grief.
The comment startled Professor Turkle,
she said, putting her in mind of a 1969 story
by Ray Bradbury, "I Sing the Body Electric!" In the story, a robotic grandmother
wins the trust of a young girl who has
recently lost her mother only after the girl
learns that the grandmother cannot die.
"In many ways throughout the story we
learn that the grandmother is actually better than a human caretaker," Professor
Turkle said, "more able to attend to each
family member's needs, less needy, with
perfect memory and inscrutable skills, and
most importantly, not mortal."
Mortality has traditionally defined the
human condition, Professor Turkle said. "A
shared sense of mortality has been the basis
for feeling a commonality with other human
beings," she said, "a sense of going through
the same life cycle, a sense of the preciousness of time and life, of its fragility.
"The possibilities of engaging emotionally with creatures that will not die, whose
loss we will never need to face, presents
potentially dramatic changes in our psychology."
And what of other lessons learned in the
cycle of life, lessons that are less traumatic
than death but still difficult?
Hasbro, for its part, sidesteps those lessons. The company has gone out of its way to
make sure that its new doll, however lifelike, will not disappoint young customers.
Put the doll down and it may fuss for a
while. Continue to ignore it and instead of
working itself up into real screams, it quiets
down and drifts off into a blissful sleep.
"At the end of the day," said Helen
Greiner, president of iRobot, "it's a toy, and
we've developed play patterns that don't
upset kids. If you don't change its diaper,
after a while it gets over it."