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Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot?

Published: 02 March 2015 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '15: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
March 2015
368 pages
ISBN:9781450328838
DOI:10.1145/2696454
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 02 March 2015

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Author Tags

  1. autonomous robot behavior
  2. children education
  3. dragonbot

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  • NSF

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HRI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 43 of 169 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)Fostering children’s creativity through LLM-driven storytelling with a social robotFrontiers in Robotics and AI10.3389/frobt.2024.145742911Online publication date: 13-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Robots’ Social Behaviors for Language Learning: A Systematic Review and Meta-AnalysisReview of Educational Research10.3102/00346543231216437Online publication date: 3-Jan-2024
  • (2024)ASSOCIATION OF EPISTEMIC CURIOSITY AND COGNITIVE ABILITY IN YOUNG CHILDREN: PREFERENCE FOR FILLING THE INFORMATION GAP OVER NOVELTYPSYCHOLOGIA10.2117/psysoc.2022-A20266:2(109-124)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)babypapa: Multiple Communication Robots to Enrich Relationship Between Parents and Child–Design and Evaluation of KANSEI Model to Control Closeness—Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics10.20965/jrm.2024.p015836:1(158-167)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Artificial Intelligence and Social-Emotional Learning: what relationship?Journal of Modern Science10.13166/jms/19676560:6(460-470)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Curiosity and Digital Stories: Exploring Preschoolers’ BehaviorsEuropean Journal of Educational Research10.12973/eu-jer.13.4.1741volume-13-2024:volume-13-issue-4-october-2024(1741-1760)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Artificial intelligence (AI) -integrated educational applications and college students’ creativity and academic emotions: students and teachers’ perceptions and attitudesBMC Psychology10.1186/s40359-024-01979-012:1Online publication date: 16-Sep-2024
  • (2024)The Case of the Curious Robot: On the Social Viability of Curious Behavior in Non-Human AgentsProceedings of the 24th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents10.1145/3652988.3673920(1-12)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2024
  • (2024)App Planner: Utilizing Generative AI in K-12 Mobile App Development EducationProceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3628516.3659392(770-775)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Doodlebot: An Educational Robot for Creativity and AI LiteracyProceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/3610977.3634950(772-780)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
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