Work

Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot?

Year: 2015

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Curiosity is key to learning, yet school children show wide variability in their eagerness to acquire information. Recent research suggests that other people have a strong influence on children's exploratory behavior. Would a curious robot elicit children's exploration and the desire to find out new things? In order to answer this question we designed a novel experimental paradigm in which a child plays an education tablet app with an autonomous social robot, which is portrayed as a younger peer. We manipulated the robot's behavior to be either curiosity-driven or not and measured the child's curiosity after the interaction. We show that some of the child's curiosity measures are significantly higher after interacting with a curious robot, compared to a non-curious one, while others do not. These results suggest that interacting with an autonomous social curious robot can selectively guide and promote children's curiosity.

Source: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)

DOI: 10.1145/2696454.2696469

Authors: Goren Gordon, Cynthia Breazeal, Susan Engel

Institutions: MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Williams College

Language: English

Topic: Social Robot Interaction and HRI

Subfield: Social Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Science Foundation, US-UK Fulbright Commission