Impact of robot responsiveness and adult involvement on children's social behaviours in human-robot interaction

TL;DR

This study investigates how robot responsiveness and adult involvement affect children's social behaviors and affect during human-robot interaction, revealing that autonomy influences engagement and perception of social presence.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how robot autonomy and adult assistance shape children's social responses and affect in HRI, informing design of more engaging social robots.

Findings

Children with autonomous robots showed increased physical activity after interaction.

Children with autonomous robots looked towards the robot more anticipating vocalizations.

Less responsive robots led to higher positive self-reported affect.

Abstract

A key challenge in developing engaging social robots is creating convincing, autonomous and responsive agents, which users perceive, and treat, as social beings. As a part of the collaborative project: Expressive Agents for Symbiotic Education and Learning (EASEL), this study examines the impact of autonomous response to children's speech, by the humanoid robot Zeno, on their interactions with it as a social entity. Results indicate that robot autonomy and adult assistance during HRI can substantially influence children's behaviour during interaction and their affect after. Children working with a fully-autonomous, responsive robot demonstrated greater physical activity following robot instruction than those working with a less responsive robot, which required adult assistance to interact with. During dialogue with the robot, children working with the fully-autonomous robot also looked towards the robot in anticipation of its vocalisations on more occasions. In contrast, a less responsive robot, requiring adult assistance to interact with, led to greater self-report positive affect and more occasions of children looking to the robot in response to its vocalisations. We discuss the broader implications of these findings in terms of anthropomorphism of social robots and in relation to the overall project strategy to further the understanding of how interactions with social robots could lead to task-appropriate symbiotic relationships.