Feasibility of a Child-like Robot for Training Clinical Psychologists in Intelligence Testing

Abstract

In recent years, as the percentage of children with developmental disabilities in regular classrooms has increased, so has the need for clinical psychologists to administer psychological tests. There are two types of training methods for psychological testing: classroom training and practical training. However, due to difficulties in securing training sites and subjects, there is no environment in which clinical psychologists can receive sufficient training in psychological testing. Therefore, in this study, we develop a child-like robot that receives intelligence tests from clinical psychologists (hereinafter referred to as the “proposed robot”). The proposed robot is equipped with the same speech content as that of a child undergoing intelligence testing. The clinical psychologist trains the robot to take the intelligence test by talking to the robot. In this paper, a questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate whether the proposed robot is effective in training by a clinical psychologist who conducts a psychological test on the robot. The experimental results shows that training with the proposed robot, which does not perform physical movements but only receives tests through speech conversation, can be effective in training for psychological testing.