Abstract
It has been well documented that children perceive robots as social, mental, and moral others. Studies on child-robot interaction may encourage this perception of robots, first, by using a Wizard of Oz (i.e., teleoperation) set-up and, second, by having robots engage in self-description. However, much remains unknown about the effects of transparent teleoperation and self-description on children’s perception of, and relationship formation with a robot. To address this research gap initially, we conducted an experimental study with a 2 × 2 (teleoperation: overt/covert; self-description: yes/no) between-subject design in which 168 children aged 7–10 interacted with a Nao robot once. Transparency about the teleoperation procedure decreased children’s perceptions of the robot’s autonomy and anthropomorphism. Self-description reduced the degree to which children perceived the robot as being similar to themselves. Transparent teleoperation and self-description affected neither children’s perceptions of the robot’s animacy and social presence nor their closeness to and trust in the robot.
Highlights
Social robots, which are designed to interact socially with people (Breazeal et al 2016), are becoming increasingly present in both personal and professional domains (e.g., Lutz et al 2019)
While research on the topic is scarce, the findings presented in an unpublished study by Huang and colleagues (2001), which is available online and cited in Nass and Brave (2005), indicate that the degree to which an artificial entity is perceived to be humanlike may influence people’s responses to its use of first-person pronouns
Based on two measures of autonomy used among adults (Rijsdijk and Hultink 2003; Rosenthal-von der Pütten et al 2017), we developed a five-item measure to assess this concept in a CRI context
Summary
Social robots, which are designed to interact socially with people (Breazeal et al 2016), are becoming increasingly present in both personal and professional domains (e.g., Lutz et al 2019). Child-robot relationships are likely to emerge, it remains unclear to what degree these social bonds will resemble children’s relationships with people, pets, and devices (Kory Westlund et al 2018). Questions have been raised about the potentially ‘deceptive’ nature of the often-employed Wizard-ofOz (WOZ) set-up, in which a robot is being remotely controlled during the interaction (for a discussion, see Kory Westlund and Breazeal 2015). Social robots are currently still rather limited in autonomously interacting with people, and children in particular, in a both socially advanced and technologically reliable manner (e.g., Tolksdorf et al 2020; van den Berghe et al 2019).
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