Affiliations: [a] Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada | [b] Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital, Edmonton, AB, Canada | [c] Faculty of Engineering, Catholic University of Portugal, Sintra, Portugal
Correspondence:
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Address for correspondence: Al Cook, PhD., Professor, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, 3-79 Corbett Hall, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2G4, Canada. Tel.: +1 780 492 8954; Fax: +1 780 492 9333; E-mail: al.cook@ualberta.ca.
Note: [1] The work of Pedro Encarnação was done during a sabbatical at the University of Alberta and at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital, and was supported in part by a FCT Fellowship.
Abstract: Several studies have demonstrated the potential of robots as assistive tools for play activities. Through the use of robots, children with motor impairments may be able to manipulate objects and engage in play activities as their typically developing peers, thus having the same opportunities to learn cognitive, social, motor and linguistic skills. Robot use can also provide a proxy measure of disabled children's cognitive abilities by comparing their performance with that of typically developing children. This paper reports a study with eighteen typically developing children aged three, four and five years to assess at which ages the cognitive concepts of causality, negation, binary logic, and sequencing are demonstrated during Lego robot use.
Keywords: Assistive robotics, play, cognitive development assessment
