Children will increasingly come of age with personified robots and potentially form social and even moral relationships with them. What will such relationships look like? To address this question, 90 children (9-, 12-, and 15-year-olds) initially interacted with a humanoid robot, Robovie, in 15-min sessions. Each session ended when an experimenter…

This article describes the findings of a 3-month study on how social encounters mediated by an online Virtual Immersive Environment (VIE) impacted on the relational self-concept of adolescents. The study gathered data from two groups of students as they took an Introduction to Design and Programming class. Students in group 1 undertook course…

Background: Face processing in Williams syndrome (WS) has been a topic of heated debate over the past decade. Initial claims about a normally developing ("intact") face-processing module were challenged by data suggesting that individuals with WS used a different balance of cognitive processes from controls, even when their behavioural scores fell…