[I capitalized the word ‘could’ in the headline of this story from The Guardian because much of the coverage of a new, short opinion piece in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood co-authored by Ananya Arora and Anmol Arora of the University of Cambridge suggests that the publication is a research study and gives the conclusions great weight. Even the co-authors note positive effects of voice assistants and steps Amazon has taken to minimize negative effects on children. A EurekAlert!
press release from the journal mistakenly identifies only one of the authors and omits some key information. At least The Guardian, and especially the story from Science Media Centre
(“Where Science Meets Headlines”) that follows below, provide some context. –Matthew]
[Image: Amazon Echo and Echo Plus devices. Credit: Elaine Thompson/AP]
Voice assistants could ‘hinder children’s social and cognitive development’
Researchers suggest devices such as Alexa could have a long-term impact on empathy, compassion and critical thinking skills
By Amelia Hill
September 28, 2022
From reminding potty-training toddlers to go to the loo to telling bedtime stories and being used as a “conversation partner”, voice-activated smart devices are being used to help rear children almost from the day they are born.
But the rapid rise in voice assistants, including Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple’s Siri could, researchers suggest, have a long-term impact on children’s social and cognitive development, specifically their empathy, compassion and critical thinking skills.
“The multiple impacts on children include inappropriate responses, impeding social development and hindering learning opportunities,” said Anmol Arora, co-author of an article published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.
A key concern is that children attribute human characteristics and behaviour to devices that are, said Arora, “essentially a list of trained words and sounds mashed together to make a sentence.”
The children anthropomorphise and then emulate the devices, copying their failure to alter their tone, volume, emphasis or intonation. Another issue is the machines’ lack of automatic expectation for children to say please or thank you.
Devices are also limited in the types of questions they can respond to. “As a result, children are going to be learning very narrow forms of questioning and always in the form of a demand,” said Arora, a researcher at the school of clinical medicine at Cambridge University.
There are also problems with recognising different accents. “If a child is particularly young, they might well not be able to pronounce particular words properly and then there’s a risk their words might be misinterpreted and they’re exposed to something inappropriate,” he said, citing an example where a 10-year-old girl was exposed to an online challenge where she was told to touch a live electric plug with a coin.
“These devices don’t understand what they’re saying,” he said. “All they’re doing is regurgitating some information in response to a narrow query, which it might have misunderstood anyway, without any real understanding of safety or who’s listening to it.”
Dr Ádám Miklósi, who recently published a study showing that use of smartphones and tablets are ‘rewiring’ children’s brains with long-term effects, said more needed to be done to get companies to take the issue seriously.
“At the moment, these devices are very primitive because the people who develop them don’t care about human interaction or their impact on children’s development,” he said.
“They know how adults use these devices but the way children use them, and the impact they have on children, is very different,” he added. “We need a lot more research, as well as ethical guidelines for their use by children”
But Dr Caroline Fitzpatrick, the Canada Research Chair in Digital Media Use by Children and Its Implications for Promoting Togetherness: An Ecosystemic Approach, said she thought there was little cause for concern.
“It’s true that children need rich context and cues to learn and develop vocabulary which at present, they can’t get through interactions with technology because it only provides very minimal information and tools and context,” she said.
“A child who was already timid or who spent too much time on their device might develop lower quality social skills and social competence than their peers, as well as difficulty using basic politeness formulations and poor non-verbal communication skills – such as interrupting and not making eye contact,” she said. “Those children would have lower quality relationships with their peers, teachers and family members and increased social isolation.
“But as long as parents keep to the recommended limits for children, and they’re getting a healthy amount of interaction from their caregivers and peers, then I don’t think there should be cause for alarm,” she added.
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This article was amended on 28 September 2022 to clarify that the concerns about the long-term effect of devices were raised in a journal article, not in a new research paper.
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[From Science Media Centre]
Expert reaction to an opinion piece on voice-controlled devices and child development
September 27, 2022
An opinion piece published in Archives of Disease in Childhood looks at the effects of smart voice control devices on children.
Dr Amy Orben, Programme Leader Track Scientist, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, said:
“This academic paper does not provide any novel evidence about the impact of voice assistants on children. It is an opinion piece, and its argument rests largely on news reports and anecdotal evidence, citing extremely little scientific evidence. Most concerns that are highlighted by this article are only backed up by news reports, and not by scientific evidence. Scientifically, little is known about the impact of voice assistants on children. The impacts of voice assistants are probably mixed and very dependent on how they are used by children.”
Prof Pete Etchells, Professor of Psychology and Science Communication, Bath Spa University, said:
“This is an opinion piece, published in an academic journal, that does not appear to have been externally peer-reviewed, and provides little in the way of convincing primary research to support its arguments. The conclusions should therefore be treated critically and with extreme caution. Instead, the opinion piece relies primarily on news articles to support the claim that we should be concerned about voice control smart devices. To date, there is no evidence that I am aware of in the research literature to support the idea that such devices have a negative impact on aspects of development such as critical thinking, empathy or compassion, as the article claims. Much to the contrary, there is an emerging body of literature which suggests that when smart speakers are used appropriately and alongside adult guidance, they can nurture some aspects of language development and can improve story comprehension.
“We know from empirical research that children use smart speakers primarily to seek out information, but that the nature of this is age-dependent – for example, younger children are more likely to ask questions about their family or themselves. But kids are smart, and it’s also the case that as they get older, they are able to modify and improve their interactions with smart speakers because they understand when they get inaccurate or irrelevant responses. In other words, as children grow up with these devices, they become more agile and adaptive at using them.
“Understanding how and why children interact with smart speakers is important, because it will give us insight into what the potential benefits and risks are, in turn allowing us to boost the former while minimising the latter. If researchers are serious about wanting to do this, then the first step in the process is to develop and build appropriate theory and suitable methodological frameworks to ask sensible research questions. It is not to write an opinion piece that has the potential to result in another unhelpful panic about digital technology.”
Declared interests:
Dr Amy Orben: “No declarations of interest.”
Prof Pete Etchells is the author of Lost in a Good Game, and of the forthcoming book Screens Are Not Your Enemy.
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