Jacqueline M. Kory Westlund
Papers
7
Total Citations
536
H-Index
7
About
Jacqueline M. Kory Westlund is a leading researcher in child-robot interaction, exploring how young children perceive, learn from, and build relationships with social robots. Her work sits at the intersection of developmental psychology, human-robot interaction, and education, with a focus on children aged 3 to 5. Her most-cited study (155 citations) revealed that preschoolers treat robots as credible informants, retaining information from them and even supplying knowledge back—a foundational insight for designing educational robots. She further demonstrated that robots can boost vocabulary through dialogic storytelling (128 citations) and that children use non-verbal cues from robots to learn new words as effectively as from humans (92 citations). Kory Westlund also pioneered methods for measuring children’s long-term relationships with robots (87 citations), addressing a critical gap in the field. Her work on framing—whether a robot is introduced as a social agent or a machine—shows that subtle cues shape children’s social behavior toward robots (48 citations). By combining rigorous experimental design with developmental theory, Kory Westlund has provided essential evidence that robots can serve as effective, engaging partners in early childhood learning and social development.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Young Children Treat Robots as Informants155 citations · 2016
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- 4Measuring young children's long-term relationships with social robots87 citations · 2018
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- 6Transparency, teleoperation, and children's understanding of social robots15 citations · 2016
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