Social Robots in Learning Scenarios: Useful Tools to Improve Students’ Attention or Potential Sources of Distraction?

Charpentier, Samantha; Chétouani, Mohamed; Truck, Isis; Cohen, David; Anzalone, Salvatore Maria

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-24670-8_12

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 27 publications

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“…The study found a more pronounced beta-band activity in the children's frontal brain region when they interacted with the robot, which was presented as evidence for activation of language and social behavior functions that are usually impaired in this group of children. Although only tested with adult population, EEG brain signals have also been employed in human-robot interaction studies to measure user attention in a learning context (Szafir and Mutlu, 2012 ; Kompatsiari et al, 2018 ; Charpentier et al, 2022 ; Vrins et al, 2022 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social robots as effective language tutors for children: empirical evidence from neuroscience

Alimardani,

Duret,

Jouen

et al. 2023

Front. Neurorobot.

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The aim of the current study was to investigate children's brain responses to robot-assisted language learning. EEG brain signals were collected from 41 Japanese children who learned French vocabularies in two groups; half of the children learned new words from a social robot that narrated a story in French using animations on a computer screen (Robot group) and the other half watched the same animated story on the screen but only with a voiceover narration and without the robot (Display group). To examine brain activation during the learning phase, we extracted EEG functional connectivity (FC) which is defined as the rhythmic synchronization of signals recorded from different brain areas. The results indicated significantly higher global synchronization of brain signals in the theta frequency band in the Robot group during the learning phase. Closer inspection of intra-hemispheric and inter-hemispheric connections revealed that children who learned a new language from the robot experienced a stronger theta-band EEG synchronization in inter-hemispheric connections, which has been previously associated with success in second language learning in the neuroscientific literature. Additionally, using a multiple linear regression analysis, it was found that theta-band FC and group assignment were significant predictors of children's language learning with the Robot group scoring higher in the post-interaction word recognition test. These findings provide novel neuroscientific evidence for the effectiveness of social robots as second language tutors for children.

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