During the summer of my Junior year at Occidental College, I was awarded a Summer Research Grant to study a question that had been growing in my mind: Do gendered robots affect how children perceive themselves and others? The question came about when Amazon’s Alexa had first become available, and I was at a friend of a friend’s house who had just gotten one. Some guys were joking around and yelling at Alexa “play my music b*tch!” And I thought, this can’t be good for the culture.

And I found out it’s not! After interviewing around 50 6-8 year olds my mentor and I found that a child’s idea of gender roles and characteristics is affected by Gendered robots. So it does turn out that creating servant robots and assigning them a women name and gender, while more marketable, is not in our best interest.

It was a really rewarding experience to develop and construct my own research project with the help of my mentor, Professor Andrew Young. For a while I thought I would become a researcher and a professor of Cognitive Science and it remains one of my greatest interests and driving forces.

However, this project was definitely a turning point for me when I realized one of the things I enjoyed the most was designing the test materials.

In constructing my own project I found that the scientific community is critically lacking effective visual test materials, and so that is what led me to develop my own. (An aside, this would be an interesting angle to revisit, this could be a great place to connect artists and scientists). I based my designs off of children’s expectations of robots and also current style trends. I taught myself Adobe After Effects to animate my robots and gained experience recording audio and video editing to put together my test materials.

 I applied and was accepted to present my research as a poster at the 2019 Society for Research in Child Development Convention.

I want to thank my mentor Professor Andrew Young for believing in me and the importance of this project, and Occidental College for giving me the space and opportunity to be a scientist for a summer.