Young Children Treat Robots as Informants

Breazeal, Cynthia; Harris, Paul L.; DeSteno, David; Westlund, Jacqueline M. Kory; Dickens, Leah; Jeong, Sooyeon

doi:10.1111/tops.12192

Cited by 126 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Prior work has found evidence that children readily treat robots as social agents [6,16,18,23,24,36]. When children are given time to develop relationships with social agents, such as in long-term human-robot interaction studies, children display social behaviors such as sharing gaze, mirroring emotions, affection, helping behaviors, turn-taking, and disclosing information [11,22,26,29,41,42].…”

Section: Background Relationship Behaviorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Westlund

Park

Williams

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Background Relationship Behaviorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Westlund

Park

Williams

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In extension of the results presented recently by Breazeal and colleagues [2], our goal was to engage children in longer communicative exchanges. The design of the dialogue is motivated by language games as suggested by Steels [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the effects of social robots have been shown in various areas of learning [1], [2], there is as yet no systematic design for how robots can engage in a dialogue with young children for a longer period of time. Indeed, Belpaeme and colleagues [3] identify the selection of a correct response in open and unconstrained environments as a technological challenge.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, Belpaeme and colleagues [3] identify the selection of a correct response in open and unconstrained environments as a technological challenge. From previous research [4], [2], we know that contingency is a key aspect eliciting children's attention, interest and reception. Contingency refers to a social responsiveness of the interaction partner on a local level [5], i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Preschoolers' engagement in social interaction with an autonomous robotic system

Lücking

Rohlfing

Wrede

et al. 2016

2016 Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract-In this paper, we present an empirical study with children at the age of 4 and 5 years to reveal whether they engage with a robot in an interaction. For our analysis, we developed a score assessing the interaction level. It consists of emotional involvement, engagement and independence of the child in the interaction. For the interaction, an autonomous system was equipped with a designed dialogic structure. It consisted of a repertoire of (pre-recorded) interaction protocols that a robot can apply in an interaction. The results from the evaluation suggest that the implementation was successful as most of the studied children engaged in the interaction with the robot. The results also reveal some gender differences. The long-term aim of the study is to develop an autonomous system that can be applied in an interaction with young children.

show abstract

“…What if a tiger suddenly appears? "), backchanneling, and other social responses, which are known to improve robot-child interaction [5] and argued to be essential for certain types of language learning [15]. Thus, our design goal is to encourage children to tell their own stories by establishing rapport, maintaining engagement, and offering scaffolding, so as to create an experience more entertaining and more engaging than traditional storytelling robots.…”

Section: Idc'17mentioning

confidence: 99%

Collaborative Storytelling between Robot and Child

Sun

Leite

Lehman

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Joint storytelling is a common parent-child activity and brings multiple benefits such as improved language learning for children. Most existing storytelling robots offer rigid interaction with children and do not contribute to children's stories. In this paper, we envision a robot that collaborates with a child to create oral stories in a highly interactive manner. We performed a Wizard-of-Oz feasibility study, which involved 78 children between 4 and 10 years old, to compare two collaboration strategies: (1) inserting new story content and relating it to the existing story and (2) inserting content without relating it to the existing story. We hypothesize the first strategy can foster true collaboration and create rapport, whereas the second is a safe strategy when the robot cannot understand the story. We observed that, although the first strategy creates heavier cognitive load, it was as enjoyable as the second. We also observed some indications that the first strategy may mitigate the difficulties in story creation for young children under the age of 7 and encourage children to speak more. This study suggests that a mixture strategy is feasible for robots in collaborative storytelling, providing sufficient cognitive challenge while concealing its shortcomings on natural language understanding.

show abstract

Young Children Treat Robots as Informants

Cited by 126 publications

References 17 publications

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

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

Preschoolers' engagement in social interaction with an autonomous robotic system

Collaborative Storytelling between Robot and Child

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About