Can Children Anthropomorphize Human-shaped Communication Media?: A Pilot Study on Co-sleeping with a Huggable Communication Medium

Abstract

This pilot study reports an experiment where we introduced huggable communication media into daytime sleep in co-sleeping situation. The purpose of the experiment was to investigate whether it would improve soothing child users' sleep and how hugging experience with anthropomorphic communication media affects child's anthropomorphic impression on the media in co-sleeping. In the experiment, nursery teachers read two-year-old or five-year-old children to sleep through huggable communication media called Hugvie and asked the children to draw Hugvie before and after the reading to evaluate changes in their impressions of Hugvie. The results show the difference of sleeping behavior with and the impressions on Hugvie between the two classes. Moreover, they also showed the possibility that co-sleeping with a humanlike communication medium induces children to sleep deeply.