Expression of curiosity in social robots: Design, perception, and effects on behaviour

J Ceha, N Chhibber, J Goh, C McDonald… - Proceedings of the …, 2019 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 2019 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 2019dl.acm.org
Curiosity-the intrinsic desire for new information-can enhance learning, memory, and
exploration. Therefore, understanding how to elicit curiosity can inform the design of
educational technologies. In this work, we investigate how a social peer robot's verbal
expression of curiosity is perceived, whether it can affect the emotional feeling and
behavioural expression of curiosity in students, and how it impacts learning. In a between-
subjects experiment, 30 participants played the game LinkIt!, a game we designed for …
Curiosity-the intrinsic desire for new information-can enhance learning, memory, and exploration. Therefore, understanding how to elicit curiosity can inform the design of educational technologies. In this work, we investigate how a social peer robot's verbal expression of curiosity is perceived, whether it can affect the emotional feeling and behavioural expression of curiosity in students, and how it impacts learning. In a between-subjects experiment, 30 participants played the game LinkIt!, a game we designed for teaching rock classification, with a robot verbally expressing: curiosity, curiosity plus rationale, or no curiosity. Results indicate that participants could recognize the robot's curiosity and that curious robots produced both emotional and behavioural curiosity contagion effects in participants.
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