The study’s lead author, Teresa Flanagan, a visiting PhD student in Duke University’s Early Childhood Cognition Lab, said the show “Westworld” on HBO’s depictions of human-robot interactions largely inspired her research.”We see how adults might interact with robots in these very cruel and horrible ways in Westworld and the movie Ex Machina,” said Flanagan, a visiting scholar in the department of psychology & neuroscience at Duke. How would children engage with them, though?For the study, the researchers asked 127 children between the ages of four to eleven who were visiting a science museum with their families to watch separate 20-second clips of Alexa and Roomba followed by answered a few questions about.