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...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
2016
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/104042 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0587-2065 |
| _version_ | 1826190316638568448 |
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| author | Gordon, Goren Breazeal, Cynthia Lynn Engel, Susan |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory Gordon, Goren Breazeal, Cynthia Lynn Engel, Susan |
| author_sort | Gordon, Goren |
| collection | MIT |
| description | 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T08:38:24Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/104042 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T08:38:24Z |
| publishDate | 2016 |
| publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1040422022-09-30T10:11:49Z Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot? Gordon, Goren Breazeal, Cynthia Lynn Engel, Susan Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Gordon, Goren Breazeal, Cynthia Lynn 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. United States-Israel Educational Foundation (Fulbright Program) National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF Grant CCF-1138986) 2016-08-26T17:43:28Z 2016-08-26T17:43:28Z 2015-03 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/ConferencePaper 9781450328838 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/104042 Gordon, Goren, Cynthia Breazeal, and Susan Engel. “Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot?” Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction - HRI ’15, March 2-5, 2015, Portland, Oregon, USA. pp. 91-98. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0587-2065 en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2696454.2696469 Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction - HRI '15 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Other univ. web domain |
| spellingShingle | Gordon, Goren Breazeal, Cynthia Lynn Engel, Susan Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot? |
| title | Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot? |
| title_full | Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot? |
| title_fullStr | Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot? |
| title_full_unstemmed | Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot? |
| title_short | Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot? |
| title_sort | can children catch curiosity from a social robot |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/104042 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0587-2065 |
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