Madeline Isabel MacIntyre
Papers
2
Total Citations
72
H-Index
2
About
Dr. Madeline Isabel MacIntyre is a pioneering developmental psychologist whose research sits at the intersection of child development and human-robot interaction. Her work investigates the fundamental nature of prosocial behavior, exploring how and why young children extend altruism to non-human agents. In her landmark study, "Investigating the nature of children's altruism using a social humanoid robot" (2019, 47 citations), she demonstrated that children as young as three exhibit genuine helping behavior toward robots, challenging assumptions about the exclusivity of human-to-human altruism. Her follow-up work, "Young Children’s Indiscriminate Helping Behavior Toward a Humanoid Robot" (2020, 25 citations), revealed that this helping is remarkably indiscriminate—children assist robots regardless of the robot’s social characteristics. These findings have profound implications for understanding the cognitive and social mechanisms underlying early altruism, suggesting that children’s helping may be driven by a broad, flexible predisposition rather than by specific social cues. Dr. MacIntyre’s work is foundational for the emerging field of child-robot interaction, informing both developmental theory and the design of socially assistive robots for educational and therapeutic settings.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 2Young Children’s Indiscriminate Helping Behavior Toward a Humanoid Robot25 citations · 2020