Children's and Adolescents' Anthropomorphic Conceptions of Social Robots and Chatbots: A Systematic Literature Review

Social robots and chatbots are becoming increasingly prevalent across various domains, with anthropomorphic design features influencing how users interact with and perceive these systems. Research in computer science education, human-computer interaction, and human-robot interaction describes the phenomenon of anthropomorphic conceptions of such systems.This contribution aims to provide an overview from an educational perspective by synthesizing existing knowledge on the types of anthropomorphic conceptions of social robots and chatbots among children and adolescents, exploring how these conceptions are explained in the literature, and whether studies suggest intervention strategies for the classroom. To achieve this, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of publications from the last five years that were retrieved from the ACM full-text collection, IEEE Xplore, and Scopus. We identified 20 peer-reviewed journal and conference articles that address children's and adolescents' anthropomorphic conceptions of social robots or chatbots as eligible for further analysis. The full texts were analyzed qualitatively in an iterative process.Our findings reveal a wide range of anthropomorphic conceptions among children and adolescents, including the attribution of cognition, emotion, intention, and other human traits to both social robots and chatbots. Additionally, we highlight a need for intervention studies that take these anthropomorphic conceptions into account. We discuss how our findings intersect with educational frameworks and propose ideas for instruction.