Abstract
In positive human-human relationships, people frequently mirror or mimic each other's behavior. This mimicry, also called entrainment, is associated with rapport and smoother social interaction. Because rapport in learning scenarios has been shown to lead to improved learning outcomes, we examined whether enabling a social robotic learning companion to perform rapport-building behaviors could improve children's learning and engagement during a storytelling activity. We enabled the social robot to perform two specific rapport and relationship-building behaviors: speech entrainment and self-disclosure (shared personal information in the form of a backstory about the robot's poor speech and hearing abilities). We recruited 86 children aged 3–8 years to interact with the robot in a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental study testing the effects of robot entrainment Entrainment vs. No entrainment and backstory about abilities Backstory vs. No Backstory. The robot engaged the children one-on-one in conversation, told a story embedded with key vocabulary words, and asked children to retell the story. We measured children's recall of the key words and their emotions during the interaction, examined their story retellings, and asked children questions about their relationship with the robot. We found that the robot's entrainment led children to show more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions. Children who heard the robot's backstory were more likely to accept the robot's poor hearing abilities. Entrainment paired with backstory led children to use more of the key words and match more of the robot's phrases in their story retells. Furthermore, these children were more likely to consider the robot more human-like and were more likely to comply with one of the robot's requests. These results suggest that the robot's speech entrainment and backstory increased children's engagement and enjoyment in the interaction, improved their perception of the relationship, and contributed to children's success at retelling the story.
Highlights
Our results are divided below into two parts, each reflecting one of our hypothesis areas: (1) Learning: We asked whether the robot’s entrainment and backstory would increase children’s learning with the robot and emulation of the robot’s story; and (2) Rapport, relationship, and social behavior: We asked whether children would show greater rapport, acceptance, positive emotion, engagement, and closeness to the robot as a result of its entrainment and backstory
We found a significant effect of Entrainment on children’s identification of the target words, F(1, 77) = 5.47, p = 0.022, ηp2
While the patterns were not significant, children were moderately more likely to use the words if they had identified them correctly in the Entrainment condition than in the No Entrainment condition. These results suggest that the robot’s rapport- and relationship-building behaviors affected either or both of (a) children’s learning and deeper understanding of the words such that they were more able to expressively use the words, or (b) children’s mirroring of the robot’s speech such that they used more of these target words, both of which would be in line with prior work linking rapport to learning (Sinha and Cassell, 2015a,b)
Summary
Social robots have been designed as peers, tutors, and teachers to help children learn a variety of subjects (Belpaeme et al, 2018), including math (Clabaugh et al, 2015; Kennedy et al, 2015), language (Movellan et al, 2009; Kory and Breazeal, 2014; Gordon et al, 2016; Kory Westlund et al, 2017a,b; Vogt et al, 2017; Rintjema et al, 2018), reading (Gordon and Breazeal, 2015), handwriting (Hood et al, 2015), social skills (Robins et al, 2005; Scassellati et al, 2018), curiosity (Gordon et al, 2015), and a growth mindset (Park et al, 2017b). One aspect of human-human interpersonal interaction that has been linked to improved learning outcomes in peer tutoring situations is rapport and positive relationships (Sinha and Cassell, 2015a,b). Because of this link, we hypothesize that improving a social robot’s capabilities for building rapport and positive relationships with children may lead to improved learning outcomes. In this paper, we explored whether enabling a social robot to perform rapport-building behaviors, including speech and behavior entrainment, and giving the robot an appropriate backstory regarding its abilities, could help establish rapport and generate positive interactions with children, which we hypothesized could improve children’s learning and engagement. Other research has shown that children may learn math concepts from media characters more effectively when they have stronger parasocial relationships with those characters (Gola et al, 2013; Richards and Calvert, 2017)
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