Hello everyone
My names is Marina Escobar-Planas and I am a PhD student form Universitat Politècnica de València
in collaboration with the Joint Research Centre from the European Commission.
And I am here to tell you about the paper: "That Robot Played with Us!"
Children's Perceptions of a Robot after a Child-Robot Group Interaction
Vicky Charisi and Emilia Gomez are with me at the HUMAINT research team
where we study how Artificial Intelligence impact humans.
But in this particular paper
we study how a group interaction with a social robot can affect children's perceptions.
With this purpose, we recruited 84 children
aged 5 to 8
an we were really lucky because we had 35 girls and 46 boys
so we paired them in groups and we had 42 teams
and we made the children in pairs to interact with the robot.
Regarding the robot, we had 4 different conditions depending on two different axes
The intelligence axis is how well the robot performs at the logic game "the hanoi tower"
And the expressivity axis is if the robot speaks neutral or if it speaks with expressions and movements
We made children go through three different sessions
In the preliminary sessions, we explained children the experiment and obtained their consents.
In the robot session , we made children play with the robot, in pairs.
And in the third session, the interview session
we interviewed children about their experience in one by one basis.
In this paper we focus on the interview session as we are really interested in children's opinions about the robot.
The interview session is split in two parts.
First an interview with 15 questions regarding familiarization, robot centered questions and social questions
And secondly, a picture task, where we showed children 7 different pictures
and ask them to point out to those that were more, or less, similar to the robot.
Before continuing I want to show you a quick example of the interaction
What you see here is two children resisting to ask for help to the robot, but struggling with the task
So when the robot offers help, they beg the robot to please stop failing.
After the robot's suggestion, children laugh, but still perform the movement
And afterwards , in the interview
both children that were aware , of the robot's mistakes,
they said that the robot was able to help them with their homework
And even one of them said that the robot knew everything.
Let's start with the results because we have tons of them
Regarding the robot manipulation behaviour Intelligence is really really well perceived.
However, Expressivity, as a more complex concept was not so accurately perceived
and usually children that played with the neutral robot tended to think that the robot was expressive.
Regarding children's answers that described the robot
we found that they referred to the robot with physical descriptions,
like eyes, or hands, avoiding any kind of phycological description.
In addition, during the interview, we could recognize that children understand that robots are programmed to do things
but they keep certain level of intentionality or own autonomy.
We could see a huge agreement at some points of the interview
many children perceived the robot as friendly, it COULD and WANTED to have friends
It also could perceived them: it could hear and see them.
And just a few children though that the robot could be able to harm someone.
We also recognized some trends.
Regarding the help relationship: if the child helps the robot or the robot helps the child
we saw that it was impacted by the robot's intelligence.
In addition, children that perceived the robot's help would ask faster for this help.
regarding the perceived robot ability to help children with their homework
we saw that, surprisingly, it was impacted by the robot's expressivity.
But, even if intelligence didn't play a role, the COLLECTIVE group performance,
at the logic task, improved the perception of the robot as a homework helper.
In addition, small children didn't perceived the robot as a homework helper so much
and our theory is that they don't have so much homework
and they perform at class a lot of handcraft activity, and this robot had no hands.
With the picture task we tried to understand the perception of the robot role.
On the one hand, we saw that children perceived the robot far for a non-animated thing
such a notebook or a teddy bear. And far from a pet.
On the other hand, we perceived a high similarity with a computer
followed by the roles of a friend and a car.
But the Expressivity played a role on this perceptions.
In this graphic, we can see how the expressive robot, the one with stripes,
was less perceived as a computer and has a higher perception of the friend role.
In addition, we saw that some children recurred to the car role as an alternative to a computer and a friend.
And they pointed out that nowadays cars can talk
To sum up, some conclusions.
Regarding intelligence, it was accurately perceived, and it improved the help relationship perception.
Regarding expressivity, it was not so accurately perceived.
However, it decreases the perception as a digital tool, and it improves the perception as a homework helper.
Regarding collaboration, we were really surprised,
because it was not a special agreement between children that played at the same team.
However, we observed that children with a high collaborative task performance,
they perceived the robot as more intelligent, more as a homework helper and more similar to a friend.
Thank you so much for listening here you can find my contact details
and please don't hesitate to contact me to discuss about this topic