Expression of Curiosity in Social Robots

Abstract

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.