Leah Dickens

Papers

Total Citations

429

H-Index

About

Leah Dickens is a developmental psychologist whose research bridges social cognition, human-robot interaction, and the evolution of trust. Her work explores how children and adults interpret nonverbal signals to make decisions about cooperation and learning. In her highly cited 2012 study (182 citations), Dickens demonstrated that humans can detect the trustworthiness of strangers in economic exchanges using subtle nonverbal cues—a finding with profound implications for understanding social decision-making. She then turned to child-robot interaction, showing in a landmark 2016 paper (155 citations) that children as young as three treat robots as credible informants, supplying them with information and retaining what they learn from them. Her 2017 follow-up (92 citations) revealed that children use the same nonverbal cues to learn new words from robots as they do from people, suggesting that our social learning mechanisms are flexible enough to extend to artificial agents. Dickens’s work has been instrumental in shaping how researchers think about the ontogeny of trust and the potential for robots as educational tools. Her findings challenge assumptions about human uniqueness in social learning and raise important questions about how children navigate an increasingly automated world.