Graham Parsonage

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About

Graham Parsonage is a researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction and developmental robotics, with a particular focus on how children perceive and engage with robotic systems. His work explores the subtle but powerful ways that experimental design and framing shape human-robot relationships. In his most-cited paper, "Designing experiments for children and robots" (2020), Parsonage demonstrated that the way a robot is introduced to children—whether as a tool requiring programming or as a team member needing to learn—profoundly alters their perception of its capabilities. In a study with 43 children aged 7–9 using a Poppy Humanoid robot, he showed that framing alone can influence how children attribute agency, intelligence, and social standing to a robot. This contribution is critical for researchers designing studies with child participants and for educators integrating robots into classrooms. Though early in his career, Parsonage’s work has already garnered attention for its methodological rigor and its implications for both robotics and developmental psychology, marking him as a thoughtful voice in the design of child-robot interaction studies.