Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot?

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 fi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Hri '15: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction USB Stick pp. 91 - 98
Main Authors: Gordon, Goren, Breazeal, Cynthia, Engel, Susan
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: ACM 02.03.2015
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Summary: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.
DOI:10.1145/2696454.2696469