Diane Poulin‐Dubois
Papers
9
Total Citations
289
H-Index
6
About
Diane Poulin-Dubois is a developmental psychologist whose research spans infant cognition, animacy understanding, and children's social learning — with a growing specialization in how young children perceive and interact with social robots. Her foundational 1996 work on infants' concept of animacy (153 citations) established her as a leading voice in early cognitive development, exploring how babies distinguish living from non-living entities. Building on this, her 2009 study demonstrated that infants can use a nonhuman agent's gaze direction to learn new words, challenging assumptions about the uniquely human dimensions of social referencing. In recent years, Poulin-Dubois has pioneered empirical investigation into children's anthropomorphism of robots and their selective trust in artificial agents. Her 2023 studies revealed that preschoolers will trust a competent robot over an incompetent human — a striking finding with implications for education and human-robot interaction. Her 2024 review article synthesizes decades of research on animism and anthropomorphism in early childhood, offering a comprehensive framework for the field. Collectively, her work has accumulated hundreds of citations and fundamentally shaped our understanding of how children conceptualize agency, mind, and social authority across both biological and artificial entities.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Infants' concept of animacy153 citations · 1996
- 2
- 3People Do Not Always Know Best: Preschoolers’ Trust in Social Robots32 citations · 2023
- 4Preschoolers’ anthropomorphizing of robots: Do human-like properties matter?27 citations · 2023
- 5Children's anthropomorphism of inanimate agents18 citations · 2024
- 6Of children and social robots7 citations · 2023
- 7
- 8Do preschoolers trust a competent robot pointer?4 citations · 2023
- 9People do not always know best: Preschoolers’ trust in social robots4 citations · 2022