Using Immediacy to Characterise Robot Social Behaviour in Child-Robot Interactions?

With an increasing number of researchers exploring Child-Robot Interaction (CRI), it becomes desirable to compare robot social behaviour between experi-mental scenarios. Such comparisons would allow researchers to better account for differences between studies in child responses to robots or interaction outcomes (such as learning or behaviour change) [4]. However, there are various problems associated with executing such evaluations in CRI contexts [2]. This extended abstract considers the use of immediacy questionnaires to characterise children’s perceptions of robot social behaviour. Challenges faced when using this measure are presented, along with some practical solutions and resources which could be of use to other researchers. We work with the Aldebaran NAO robot, used in conjunction with a large horizontal touchscreen. Experiments are typically conducted with children aged between 7 and 9, and in schools. Depending on availability, this might be a school classroom, or a quiet communal space familiar to the children. The robot is commonly employed as a one-to-one tutor; the aim is to explore how children respond to different robot behaviours and how robot social behaviour affects child learning [4]. We use Immediacy questionnaires to characterise robot social behaviour from the perspective of children [4]. Immediacy represents the communicative availability of an interaction partner and is measured through a series of questions about verbal and nonverbal items, including gestures, gaze, touch, and facial expressions (among many others) [5]. Immediacy assesses multimodal social cues in context and high immediacy behaviours positively correlate with increased learning, making it desirable to use for CRI in educational scenarios [4,5]