Work

Measuring young children's long-term relationships with social robots

Year: 2018

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Social robots are increasingly being developed for long-term interactions with children in domains such as healthcare, education, therapy, and entertainment. As such, we need to deeply understand how children's relationships with robots develop through time. However, there are few validated assessments for measuring young children's long-term relationships. In this paper, we present a pilot test of four assessments that we have adapted or created for use in this context with children aged 5--6: the Inclusion of Other in Self task, the Social-Relational Interview, the Narrative Description, and the Self-disclosure Task. We show that children can appropriately respond to these assessments with reasonably high internal reliability, and that the proposed assessments are able to capture child-robot relationship adjustments over a long-term interaction. Furthermore, we discuss gender and population differences in children's responses.

Source: ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC)

DOI: 10.1145/3202185.3202732

Authors: Jacqueline M. Kory Westlund, Hae Won Park, Randi Williams, Cynthia Breazeal

Institutions: MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Language: English

Topic: Social Robot Interaction and HRI

Subfield: Social Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: National Science Foundation

Award: EXP: Collaborative Research: A Personalized Storyteller Companion to Promote Preschooler Language Skills