You’re Doing It Wrong! Studying Unexpected Behaviors in Child-Robot Interaction

Abstract

We present a study on the impact of unexpected robot behaviors on the perception of a robot by children and their subsequent engagement in a playful interaction based on a novel “domino” task. We propose an original analysis methodology which blends behavioral cues and reported phenomenological perceptions into a compound index. While we found only a limited recognition of the different misbehaviors of the robot that we attribute to the age of the child participants (4–5 years old), interesting findings include a sustained engagement level, an unexpectedly low level of attribution of higher cognitive abilities and a negative correlation between anthropomorphic projections and actual behavioral engagement.