Social robots in research on social and cognitive development in infants and toddlers: A scoping review

Solveig Flatebø; Vi Ngoc-Nha Tran; Catharina Elisabeth Arfwedson Wang; Lars Ailo Bongo

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0303704

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 5, 2024
22 Mar 2024 Decision Letter - Simone Varrasi, Editor PONE-D-24-04880Social robots in research on social and cognitive development in infants and toddlers: A Scoping reviewPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Flatebø, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by May 06 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Simone Varrasi Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. We note that Figure 3 includes an image of a participant in the study. As per the PLOS ONE policy (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-human-subjects-research) on papers that include identifying, or potentially identifying, information, the individual(s) or parent(s)/guardian(s) must be informed of the terms of the PLOS open-access (CC-BY) license and provide specific permission for publication of these details under the terms of this license. Please download the Consent Form for Publication in a PLOS Journal (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=8ce6/plos-consent-form-english.pdf). The signed consent form should not be submitted with the manuscript, but should be securely filed in the individual's case notes. Please amend the methods section and ethics statement of the manuscript to explicitly state that the patient/participant has provided consent for publication: “The individual in this manuscript has given written informed consent (as outlined in PLOS consent form) to publish these case details”. If you are unable to obtain consent from the subject of the photograph, you will need to remove the figure and any other textual identifying information or case descriptions for this individual. 3. Please remove your figures from within your manuscript file, leaving only the individual TIFF/EPS image files, uploaded separately. These will be automatically included in the reviewers’ PDF. 4. We note that this manuscript is a systematic review or meta-analysis; our author guidelines therefore require that you use PRISMA guidance to help improve reporting quality of this type of study. Please upload copies of the completed PRISMA checklist as Supporting Information with a file name “PRISMA checklist”. 5. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. Additional Editor Comments: Both Reviewers recognized the high value of your manuscript. They reported some suggestions that do not question the methodological structure of your work, but yet they are important for the improvement of its quality and for the adherence to editorial guidelines. Please consider them as appropriate. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: N/A Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Dear authors, your scoping review about social robots in research on social and cognitive development in infants and toddlers is really interesting and scientifically useful. It is fluid and well written. Minor concerns are suggested: From line 60, you deal with the scientific literature about the role of social robot as methodology of developmental psychology research. You could introduce this topic dealing with how social robots began to be used in assessment. These pioneering studies could help you: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89327-3_8 ; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96728-8_34 (in this case, the paper is focused on children with autism and intellectual disability, but it is really interesting); Reviewer #2: Dear authors, thank you for submitting your work to the journal PLOS ONE. I reckon the study is very interesting. I just found few details that may need to be checked. 1. Bibliography isn’t justified and the insertion of DOI would be appreciated. 2. Tables should have their description underneath, not above (e.g. tab. 3, 5, 6…) 3. Use grid lines, especially separating long lists. (S1 Table 1). 4. In which field would you like to expand the future perspective of the technique? ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303704.r001
Revision 1
22 Apr 2024 Author Response Dr Simone Varrasi Academic Editor PLOS ONE Dear Dr Simone Varrasi, Thank you for your decision letter regarding our submission PONE-D-24-04880 “Social robots in research on social and cognitive development in infants and toddlers: A Scoping review”, and for inviting us to resubmit our manuscript after minor revisions. For clarity, throughout this letter, we use italics to mark your and the Reviewer’s comments and blue to mark our new text. We have carefully read both the reviews and your letter. We made a great effort to incorporate all the points offered in the letter and in the two reviews to improve our manuscript. We have also proofread the manuscript again and corrected minor typos and errors. Below is a detailed list of how we addressed all the Reviewers’ and your points. We hope that with this minor revision, our manuscript will be accepted for publication in PLOS ONE. Please see below how we addressed your and the reviewer’s feedback. Sincerely, Solveig Flatebø PhD student UiT The Arctic University of Norway - solveig.flatebo@uit.no +47 95 48 46 03 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf [Our response:] We have double-checked, and our manuscript follows PLOS ONE’s style requirements, and the files are named correctly. 2. We note that Figure 3 includes an image of a participant in the study. As per the PLOS ONE policy (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-human-subjects-research) on papers that include identifying, or potentially identifying, information, the individual(s) or parent(s)/guardian(s) must be informed of the terms of the PLOS open-access (CC-BY) license and provide specific permission for publication of these details under the terms of this license. Please download the Consent Form for Publication in a PLOS Journal(http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=8ce6/plos-consent-form-english.pdf). The signed consent form should not be submitted with the manuscript, but should be securely filed in the individual's case notes. Please amend the methods section and ethics statement of the manuscript to explicitly state that the patient/participant has provided consent for publication: “The individual in this manuscript has given written informed consent (as outlined in PLOS consent form) to publish these case details” If you are unable to obtain consent from the subject of the photograph, you will need to remove the figure and any other textual identifying information or case descriptions for this individual. [Our response:] All images in Figure 3 are licensed under CC-BY and can freely be used by others, including image “h” of the ReplieQ2 robot. Image “h” displays two configurations of the “female” ReplieQ2 robot developed by Kokoro and Osaka University and Advanced Media, Inc. The leftward picture of the robot is the original Android configuration, whereas the picture to the right is the same robot stripped down to its underlying mechanical look. Therefore, since this is a picture of a robot and not a human participant, we have not removed picture “h” in Figure 3. However, we acknowledge that the android can easily be mistaken for a human, and we have therefore added the following sentence in the figure’s note to clarify (lines 250-251 in the clean manuscript): [Our new text:] […]. The Android and mechanical configurations of the same robot are shown in image (h). 3. Please remove your figures from within your manuscript file, leaving only the individual TIFF/EPS image files, uploaded separately. These will be automatically included in the reviewers’ PDF. [Our response:] Thanks for bringing this to our attention. All figures within the manuscript files have been removed, and the individual TIFF image files have been uploaded separately. 4. We note that this manuscript is a systematic review or meta-analysis; our author guidelines therefore require that you use PRISMA guidance to help improve reporting quality of this type of study. Please upload copies of the completed PRISMA checklist as Supporting Information with a file name “PRISMA checklist”. [Our response:] We have now uploaded the PRISMA checklist as Supporting Information with the correct file name, “S1_File_PRISMA_Checklist,” as requested. The PRISMA checklist was also uploaded in the first submission, but it did not have the correct file name. 5. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Our response:] We have reviewed our reference list, and it is complete and correct. We have not cited any retracted papers. Reviewer #1: Dear authors, your scoping review about social robots in research on social and cognitive development in infants and toddlers is really interesting and scientifically useful. It is fluid and well written. Reviewer #2: Thank you for submitting your work to the journal PLOS ONE. I reckon the study is very interesting. [Our response:] We thank both Reviewers for this positive feedback. Reviewer #1: From line 60, you deal with the scientific literature about the role of social robot as methodology of developmental psychology research. You could introduce this topic dealing with how social robots began to be used in assessment. These pioneering studies could help you: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89327-3_8 ; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96728-8_34 (in this case, the paper is focused on children with autism and intellectual disability, but it is really interesting) [Our response:] We thank the reviewer for introducing us to these studies on robots' implications in psychological assessments. As the reviewer suggested, we read the papers linked to and read about the topic. In the Introduction, we added sentences that point to the importance of the topics raised by the Reviewer in connection with our study (lines 61-63 in the clean manuscript). [Our new text:] Some pioneering studies have also demonstrated that social robots can contribute to cognitive assessments of elderly people and children with autism [32, 33]. [Our response continued:] Moreover, we added the reference https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89327-3_8 to our discussion about the advantages of using social robots in research in the Introduction (lines 75-76 in the clean manuscript). [Our new text:] […]. Firstly, they provide a level of control and consistency that can be challenging to achieve with human experimenters [32, 44]. Reviewer #2: 1. Bibliography isn’t justified and the insertion of DOI would be appreciated. [Our response:] Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. We have now applied the PLoS reference style, which includes the DOI of all papers. Reviewer #2: 2. Tables should have their description underneath, not above (e.g. tab. 3, 5, 6…) [Our response:] We have now checked all tables in the manuscript and supporting information and changed them so that they meet the table requirements (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/tables). We have also corrected the tables so that the table labels and titles are presented in bold font underneath them. Reviewer #2: 3. Use grid lines, especially separating long lists. (S1 Table 1). [Our response:] We have applied grid lines to all our tables, also in the long lists in the S1 Table 1 and in Table 4. Reviewer #2: 4. In which field would you like to expand the future perspective of the technique? [Our response:] Thanks for raising this important issue. We believe that the manuscript primarily falls under the field of developmental psychology, but it also has implications for the field of social robotics. The manuscript highlights crucial features of robots that are significant for young children and must be considered when developing age-appropriate robots in social robotics. However, the main topic in the reviewed literature is whether infants and toddlers perceive social robots as social partners, which are fundamental research questions belonging to the field of developmental psychology. We have highlighted this issue within the manuscript by adding several new sentences in the Future directions (lines 503-504 and 510-512) and by rewriting the last sentences in the Conclusion (lines 539-542 in the clean manuscript) to clarify which fields we would like to expand the future perspective. [Our new text:] This review has allowed us to identify important directions for future research, primarily within developmental psychology but also in social robotics. (Lines 503-504 in the clean manuscript). […] Findings on what robot behaviors are crucial for young children may have implications for future work within social robotics when aiming to develop age-appropriate robots. (Lines 510-512 in the clean manuscript). These insights have implications for future studies within developmental psychology involving social robots and young children and future work within social robotics on designing appropriate robot behaviors to facilitate social interaction with robots in early childhood. (Lines 539-542 in the clean manuscript). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303704.r002
30 Apr 2024 Decision Letter - Simone Varrasi, Editor Social robots in research on social and cognitive development in infants and toddlers: A Scoping review PONE-D-24-04880R1 Dear Dr. Flatebø, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Simone Varrasi Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303704.r003
Formally Accepted
2 May 2024 Acceptance Letter - Simone Varrasi, Editor PONE-D-24-04880R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Flatebø, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, if your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at customercare@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Simone Varrasi Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303704.r004

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .