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About

Anna-Elisabeth Baumann is a developmental psychologist whose research sits at the fascinating intersection of child cognition and human-robot interaction. Her work primarily examines how young children perceive, categorize, and learn from social robots — a question with growing relevance as robotic agents become increasingly present in children's everyday environments. Baumann's most influential contributions investigate preschoolers' selective trust in robots versus humans. Her highly cited 2023 work, "People Do Not Always Know Best" (32 citations), challenges the assumption that children default to human authority, demonstrating that young children can prefer learning from a competent robot over an incompetent human. Complementing this, her research on anthropomorphism explores how children's animacy judgments about robots shift with age and the robot's human-like features, revealing important developmental nuances in how 3- and 5-year-olds categorize living and non-living agents. Baumann has also advanced understanding of children's Theory of Mind in robotic contexts, examining how preschoolers attribute psychological properties to humanoid robots like NAO. Across her body of work — accumulating over 80 citations in just a few years — she has established herself as an emerging voice shaping how developmental science approaches the increasingly robot-integrated world children are growing up in.