Lydia Morrison

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About

Lydia Morrison is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of developmental psychology and human-robot interaction. Her work focuses on leveraging autonomous social robots as tools for digital ethnography, particularly to study the natural, unstructured behaviors of very young children. Her most cited study, "Home Alone: Social Robots for Digital Ethnography of Toddler Behavior" (2013, 21 citations), is a landmark contribution. In this field study, Morrison deployed the social robot RUBI-5 to interact autonomously with 16 toddlers over 28 days at an Early Childhood Education Center. This work, part of the long-running RUBI project she helped advance, demonstrated that robots can serve as patient, non-judgmental observers, capturing rich behavioral data that is difficult for human researchers to collect. By showing that a robot can be left "home alone" with children, Morrison opened new avenues for longitudinal, ecologically valid studies of early social and cognitive development. Her innovative methodology bridges engineering and child psychology, offering a powerful new tool for understanding how toddlers learn and interact in their natural environments.