Developmental Psychology · Cognitive Science · Human–Robot Interaction
Teresa (Tess) Flanagan
I study how children and adults think of and engage with interactive technologies.
I am a postdoctoral scholar at the Data Science Institute at the University of Chicago, working in the SEBO Lab. My research explores whether we apply our social cognitive mechanisms with robots and artificial intelligence, and what the answer to that question ought to mean for the people designing the systems that children and adults now encounter every day.
Position
Postdoctoral Scholar
Data Science Institute, University of Chicago
Doctorate
Ph.D. Developmental Psychology
Cornell University, 2023
The questions I keep returning to
Children and adults alike are forming beliefs about the technologies around them rather more quickly than developmental science has managed to document, and the areas below describe where I have concentrated that work.
- 01
Theories of machines
What kind of thing do we take a robot to be?
I study the beliefs children and adults hold about what machines can feel, know, choose, and deserve. Those ideas are more structured than a simple verdict about whether a robot is alive, and they change with age, experience, and the kind of machine someone encounters.
Read more - 02
Engagement with machines
How do we come to trust and connect with robots?
I also study what happens once an interaction is underway: whether people trust a robot, feel connected to it, or want to keep engaging. Children do not simply scale down the adult response; their trust and connection follow a developmental path of their own.
Read more - 03
Social cognitive development
How do we come to understand other minds at all?
Not all of this work is about technology. I also study how children reason about explanation, evidence, and other minds, which is the foundation for the questions I ask about machines.
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