Cover not available
Article published In:
Child-Robot Interaction: Design, Evaluation, and Novel Solutions
Edited by Marta Couto, Shruti Chandra, Elmira Yadollahi and Vicky Charisi
[Interaction Studies 23:2] 2022
► pp. 243–288

Exploring space for robot mistakes in child robot interactions

ORCID logo | KTH Royal Institute of Technology
| Centre INRIA de Bordeaux
| SCIP
| University of Zurich
| Sorbonne Université
| Constructor University

Understanding the impact of robot errors in child-robot-interactions (CRI) is critical, as current technological systems are still limited and may randomly present a variety of mistakes during interactions with children. In this study we manipulate a task-based error of a NAO robot during a semi-autonomous computational thinking task implemented with the Cozmo robot. Data from 72 children aged 7–10 were analysed regarding their attitudes towards NAO (social trust, competency trust, liking, and perceived agency), their behaviour towards the robot (self-disclosure, following recommendations), as well as their task performance. We did not find quantitative effects of the robot’s error on children’s self-reported attitudes, behaviour, or task performance. Age was also not significantly related to either social attitudes or behaviours towards NAO, although there were some age-related differences in task performance. Potential reasons behind the lack of statistical effects and limitations of the study with regards to the manipulation of robot errors are discussed and insights into the design of future CRI studies provided.

Keywords: child-robot-interaction, human-robot-interaction, user study, education, trust, liking, agency, robot errors, faulty robots, in-the-wild
Article outline
  • Exploring space for robot mistakes in child robot interactions
    • Trust
      • Self-disclosure
      • Selective trust
    • Pro-social attitudes
    • Perceived agency
  • Current study
  • Implementation of CozmoNAOts: A computational thinking task
    • Software architecture
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Procedure
      • NAO’s turn
        • Error manipulation
      • Child’s turn
    • Measures
      • Self-report questionnaire
      • Behavioural measures
        • Preference test
        • Self-disclosure
      • Task performance
      • Semi-structured interview
      • Parent questionnaire
    • Hypotheses
  • Results
    • Child questionnaire
    • Preference test
    • Self-disclosure
    • Task performance
      • Following instructions
      • Number of turns
      • Mistakes made
      • Recollection of Cozmo’s path
    • Semi-structured interview
      • Social trust
      • Competency trust
      • Agency
      • Liking
    • Parent questionnaire
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Author declarations
    • Conflict of interest statement
    • Author contributions
    • Data availability statement
    • Ethics
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 March 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.21034.sto
References
Baker, A. L., Phillips, E. K., Ullman, D., & Keebler, J. R.
(2018) Toward an understanding of trust repair in human-robot interaction. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 8 (4), 1–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barco, A., de Jong, C., Peter, J., Kühne, R., & van Straten, C. L.
(2020) Robot Morphology and Children’s Perception of Social Robots. Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 125–127. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Belpaeme, T., Baxter, P., de Greeff, J., Kennedy, J., Read, R., Looije, R., Neerincx, M., Baroni, I., & Zelati, M. C.
(2013) Child-Robot Interaction: Perspectives and Challenges. International conference on social robotics (icsr) (pp. 452–459). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Belpaeme, T., Kennedy, J., Ramachandran, A., Scassellati, B., & Tanaka, F.
(2018) Social robots for education: A review. Science Robotics, 3 (21), eaat5954. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bernard, S., Harris, P. L., Terrier, N., & Clément, F.
(2015) Children weigh the number of informants and perceptual uncertainty when identifying objects. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 136 1, 70–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bethel, C. L., Henkel, Z., Stives, K., May, D. C., Eakin, D. K., Pilkinton, M., Jones, A., & Stubbs-Richardson, M.
(2016) Using robots to interview children about bullying: Lessons learned from an exploratory study. 2016 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 712–717. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bethel, C. L., Stevenson, M. R., & Scassellati, B.
(2011) Secret-sharing: Interactions between a child, robot, and adult. 2011 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 2489–2494. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Breazeal, C., Harris, P. L., DeSteno, D., Kory Westlund, J. M., Dickens, L., & Jeong, S.
(2016) Young Children Treat Robots as Informants. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8 (2), 481–491. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brink, K. A., & Wellman, H. M.
(2020) Robot teachers for children? Young children trust robots depending on their perceived accuracy and agency. Developmental Psychology, 56 (7), 1268–1277. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Castellano, G., Leite, I., Pereira, A., Martinho, C., Paiva, A., & McOwan, P. W.
(2012) Detecting Engagement in HRI: An Exploration of Social and Task-Based Context. 2012 International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust and 2012 International Confernece on Social Computing, 421–428. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chandra, S., Alves-Oliveira, P., Lemaignan, S., Sequeira, P., Paiva, A., & Dillenbourg, P.
(2016) Children’s peer assessment and self-disclosure in the presence of an educational robot. 2016 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), (August), 539–544. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cohen, I., Looije, R., & Neerincx, M. A.
(2014) Child’s Perception of Robot’s Emotions: Effects of Platform, Context and Experience. International Journal of Social Robotics, 6 (4), 507–518. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cohn, N. B., & Strassberg, D. S.
(1983) Self-Disclosure Reciprocity among Preadolescents. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 9 (1), 97–102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collins, N. L., & Miller, L. C.
(1994) Self-disclosure and liking: a meta-analytic review. Psychological bulletin, 116 (3), 457. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dang, J., King, K. M., & Inzlicht, M.
(2020) Why are self-report and behavioral measures weakly correlated? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24 (4), 267–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Houwer, J.
(2006) What are implicit measures and why are we using them. The handbook of implicit cognition and addiction, 11–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Di Dio, C., Manzi, F., Peretti, G., Cangelosi, A., Harris, P. L., Massaro, D., & Marchetti, A.
(2020) Shall I Trust You? From Child-Robot Interaction to Trusting Relationships. Frontiers in Psychology, 11 1 (April). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fagerlund, J., Häkkinen, P., Vesisenaho, M., & Viiri, J.
(2021) Computational thinking in programming with scratch in primary schools: a systematic review. Computer Applications in Engineering Education, 29 (1), 12–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fior, M., Nugent, S., Beran, T. N., Ramírez-Serrano, A., & Kuzyk, R.
(2010) Children’s relationships with robots: robot is child’s new friend. Journal of Physical Agents (JoPha), 4 (3), 9–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geiskkovitch, D. Y., Thiessen, R., Young, J. E., & Glenwright, M. R.
(2019) What? That’s Not a Chair!: How Robot Informational Errors Affect Children’s Trust Towards Robots. 2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 48–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geiskkovitch, D. Y., & Young, J. E.
(2020) Social robots don’t do that: exploring robot-typical errors in child-robot interaction. Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 200–202. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gray, H. M., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M.
(2007) Dimensions of Mind Perception. Science, 315 (5812), 619–619. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harris, P. L., Koenig, M. A., Corriveau, K. H., & Jaswal, V. K.
(2018) Cognitive Foundations of Learning from Testimony. Annual Review of Psychology, 69 (1), 251–273. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Henkel, Z., Baugus, K., Bethel, C. L., & May, D. C.
(2019) User expectations of privacy in robot assisted therapy. Paladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics, 10 (1), 140–159. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hertz, N., & Wiese, E.
(2016) Influence of agent type and task ambiguity on conformity in social decision making. Proceedings of the human factors and ergonomics society annual meeting, 60 (1), 313–317. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, A., Castellano, G., & Bull, S.
(2014) Investigating the Effect of a Robotic Tutor on Learner Perception of Skill Based Feedback. Lecture notes in computer science (including subseries lecture notes in artificial intelligence and lecture notes in bioinformatics) (pp. 186–195). Springer International Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kahn, P. H., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., Freier, N. G., Severson, R. L., Gill, B. T., Ruckert, J. H., & Shen, S.
(2012) “robovie, you’ll have to go into the closet now”: children’s social and moral relationships with a humanoid robot. Developmental Psychology, 48 (2), 303–314. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kahn, P. H., & Turiel, E.
(1988) Children’s Conceptions of Trust in the Context of Social Expectations. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 34 (4), 403–419.Google Scholar
Kennedy, J., Baxter, P., & Belpaeme, T.
(2015) The Robot Who Tried Too Hard. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction – HRI ’15, (801), 67–74. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koenig, M. A., Clement, F., & Harris, P. L.
(2004) Trust in Testimony: Children’s Use of True and False Statements. Psychological Science, 15 (10), 694–698. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koenig, M. A., & Harris, P. L.
(2005) Preschoolers Mistrust Ignorant and Inaccurate Speakers. Child Development, 76 (6), 1261–1277. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kory-Westlund, J. M., & Breazeal, C.
(2019a) A Long-Term Study of Young Children’s Rapport, Social Emulation, and Language Learning With a Peer-Like Robot Playmate in Preschool. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 6 1(September), 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2019b) Exploring the Effects of a Social Robot’s Speech Entrainment and Backstory on Young Children’s Emotion, Rapport, Relationship, and Learning. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 6 1(July). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Landrum, A. R., Eaves, B. S., & Shafto, P.
(2015) Learning to trust and trusting to learn: a theoretical framework. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (3), 109–111. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Landrum, A. R., Mills, C. M., & Johnston, A. M.
(2013) When do children trust the expert? Benevolence information influences children’s trust more than expertise. Developmental Science, 16 (4), 622–638. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Landrum, A. R., Pflaum, A. D., & Mills, C. M.
(2016) Inducing Knowledgeability From Niceness: Children Use Social Features for Making Epistemic Inferences. Journal of Cognition and Development, 17 (5), 699–717. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leite, I., Castellano, G., Pereira, A., Martinho, C., & Paiva, A.
(2014) Empathic Robots for Long-term Interaction: Evaluating Social Presence, Engagement and Perceived Support in Children. International Journal of Social Robotics, 6 (3), 329–341. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leite, I., Martinho, C., & Paiva, A.
(2013) Social Robots for Long-Term Interaction: A Survey. International Journal of Social Robotics, 5 (2), 291–308. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lemaignan, S., Fink, J., Mondada, F., & Dillenbourg, P.
(2015) You’re doing it wrong! studying unexpected behaviors in child-robot interaction. International conference on social robotics (pp. 390–400). Springer International Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ligthart, M., Neerincx, M. A., Bindsbergen, K. L. A. V., & Grootenhuis, M. A.
(2019) A Child and a Robot Getting Acquainted – Interaction Design for Eliciting Self-Disclosure. Proc. of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi- agent Systems (AAMAS 2019), 8–11.Google Scholar
Looije, R., Neerincx, M. A., & de Lange, V.
(2008) Children’s responses and opinion on three bots that motivate, educate and play. Journal of Physical Agents (JoPha), 2 (2), 13–20. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mair, P., & Wilcox, R.
(2020) Robust statistical methods in R using the WRS2 package. Behavior Research Methods, 52 (2), 464–488. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Malle, B. F., & Ullman, D.
(2021) A Multi-Dimensional Conception and Measure of Human-Robot Trust. Trust in human-robot interaction: research and applications, 3–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Manzi, F., Peretti, G., Di Dio, C., Cangelosi, A., Itakura, S., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., Massaro, D., & Marchetti, A.
(2020) A Robot Is Not Worth Another: Exploring Children’s Mental State Attribution to Different Humanoid Robots. Frontiers in Psychology, 11 1 (September), 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mascarenhas, S., Melo, F. S., & Paiva, A.
(2018) Exploring the Impact of Fault Justification in Human-Robot Trust. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2018) (2018) 507–513, 507–513.Google Scholar
Melson, G. F., Kahn, P. H., Beck, A., Friedman, B., Roberts, T., Garrett, E., & Gill, B. T.
(2009) Children’s behavior toward and understanding of robotic and living dogs. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 30 (2), 92–102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mirnig, N., Stollnberger, G., Miksch, M., Stadler, S., Giuliani, M., & Tscheligi, M.
(2017) To Err Is Robot: How Humans Assess and Act toward an Erroneous Social Robot. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 4 1, 1–15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Obaid, M., Aylett, R., Barendregt, W., Basedow, C., Corrigan, L. J., Hall, L., Jones, A., Kappas, A., Küster, D., Paiva, A., Papadopoulos, F., Serholt, S., & Castellano, G.
(2018) Endowing a Robotic Tutor with Empathic Qualities: Design and Pilot Evaluation. International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, 15 (06), 1850025. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Papert, S.
(1980) Childern, Computer, and Powerful Ideas 2nd Edition. MINDSTORMS: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, 19–37.Google Scholar
Primo Toys
(2017) Beginning computer programming for kids. [URL]
Salem, M., Lakatos, G., Amirabdollahian, F., & Dautenhahn, K.
(2015) Would You Trust a (Faulty) Robot? Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction – HRI ’15, 141–148. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Saylor, M. M., Somanader, M. C., Levin, D. T., & Kawamura, K.
(2010) How do young children deal with hybrids of living and non-living things: The case of humanoid robots. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 28 (4), 835–851. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sebo, S. S., Krishnamurthi, P., & Scassellati, B.
(2019) “i don’t believe you”: investigating the effects of robot trust violation and repair. 2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2019-March, 57–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Serholt, S., Pareto, L., Ekström, S., & Ljungblad, S.
(2020) Trouble and Repair in Child-Robot Interaction: A Study of Complex Interactions With a Robot Tutee in a Primary School Classroom. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 7 1(April), 1–13. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Severson, R. L., & Carlson, S. M.
(2010) Behaving as or behaving as if? Children’s conceptions of personified robots and the emergence of a new ontological category. Neural Networks, 23 (8–9), 1099–1103. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smakman, M., Vogt, P., & Konijn, E. A.
(2021) Moral considerations on social robots in education: a multi-stakeholder perspective. Computers & Education, 174 1, 104317. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Somanader, M. C., Saylor, M. M., & Levin, D. T.
(2011) Remote control and children’s understanding of robots. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 109 (2), 239–247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sommer, K., Davidson, R., Armitage, K. L., Slaughter, V., Wiles, J., & Nielsen, M.
(2020) Preschool children overimitate robots, but do so less than they overimitate humans. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 191 1, 104702. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sommer, K., Slaughter, V., Wiles, J., Owen, K., Chiba, A. A., Forster, D., Malmir, M., & Nielsen, M.
(2021) Can a robot teach me that? children’s ability to imitate robots. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 203 1, 105040. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stower, R., Calvo-Barajas, N., Castellano, G., & Kappas, A.
(2021) A meta-analysis on children’s trust in social robots. International Journal of Social Robotics. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stower, R., & Kappas, A.
(2020) “oh no , my instructions were wrong !” an exploratory pilot towards children’s trust in social robots. The 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication, 641–646. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2021) CozmoNAOts : Designing an Autonomous Learning Task with Social and Educational Robots. Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’21), June 24–30, 2021, Athens, Greece, 1 (1), 1–8. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tielman, M., Neerincx, M., Meyer, J.-J., & Looije, R.
(2014) Adaptive emotional expression in robot-child interaction. Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction – HRI ’14, 407–414. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tolksdorf, N. F., & Rohlfing, K. J.
(2020) Parents’ views on using social robots for language learning. 2020 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 634–640. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tolksdorf, N. F., Siebert, S., Zorn, I., Horwath, I., & Rohlfing, K. J.
(2021) Ethical considerations of applying robots in kindergarten settings: towards an approach from a macroperspective. International Journal of Social Robotics, 13 (2), 129–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tolmeijer, S., Weiss, A., Hanheide, M., Lindner, F., Powers, T. M., Dixon, C., & Tielman, M. L.
(2020) Taxonomy of trust-relevant failures and mitigation strategies. Proceedings of the 2020 acm/ieee international conference on human-robot interaction (pp. 3–12). Association for Computing Machinery. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tong, Y., Wang, F., & Danovitch, J.
(2020) The role of epistemic and social characteristics in children’s selective trust: Three meta-analyses. Developmental Science, 23 (2), 1–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van den Berghe, R., de Haas, M., Oudgenoeg-Paz, O., Krahmer, E., Verhagen, J., Vogt, P., Willemsen, B., de Wit, J., & Leseman, P.
(2020) A toy or a friend? Children’s anthropomorphic beliefs about robots and how these relate to second-language word learning. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, (September 2019), 1–15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Straten, C. L., Kühne, R., Peter, J., de Jong, C., & Barco, A.
(2020) Closeness, trust, and perceived social support in child-robot relationship formation. Interaction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems, 21 (1), 57–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Straten, C. L., Peter, J., Kühne, R., & Barco, A.
(2021) The wizard and I: How transparent teleoperation and self-description (do not) affect children’s robot perceptions and child-robot relationship formation. AI and Society, (0123456789). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Straten, C. L., Peter, J., Kühne, R., de Jong, C., & Barco, A.
(2018) Technological and Interpersonal Trust in Child-Robot Interaction. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction – HAI ’18, 253–259. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Waveren, S., Carter, E. J., & Leite, I.
(2019) Take one for the team: the effects of error severity in collaborative tasks with social robots. Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 151–158. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vollmer, A.-L., Read, R., Trippas, D., & Belpaeme, T.
(2018) Children conform, adults resist: A robot group induced peer pressure on normative social conformity. Science Robotics, 3 (21), eaat7111. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weiss, A., Scherndl, T., Buchner, R., & Tscheligi, M.
(2010) A robot as persuasive social actor a field trial on child-robot interaction. Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction – A Symposium at the AISB 2010 Convention, 136–142.Google Scholar
Westlund, J. M. K., Park, H. W., Williams, R., & Breazeal, C.
(2018) Measuring young children’s long-term relationships with social robots. Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children – IDC ’18, 207–218. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wheeless, L. R., & Grotz, J.
(1977) the Measurement of Trust and Its Relationship To Self-Disclosure. Human Communication Research, 3 (3), 250–257. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wood, L. J., Dautenhahn, K., Lehmann, H., Robins, B., Rainer, A., & Syrdal, D. S.
(2013) Robot-mediated interviews : Does a robotic interviewer impact question difficulty and information recovery? Assistive Technology : From Research to Practice, proceedings of the AAATE 2013 Conference.Google Scholar
Wood, L. J., Dautenhahn, K., Rainer, A., Robins, B., Lehmann, H., & Syrdal, D. S.
(2013) Robot-Mediated Interviews – How Effective Is a Humanoid Robot as a Tool for Interviewing Young Children? (M. Slater, Ed.). PLoS ONE, 8 (3), e59448. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yadollahi, E., Couto, M., Dillenbourg, P., & Paiva, A.
(2020) Can you guide me?: Supporting children’s spatial perspective taking through games with robots. Extended Abstracts – Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference, IDC 2020, (June), 217–222. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yadollahi, E., Johal, W., Paiva, A., & Dillenbourg, P.
(2018) When deictic gestures in a robot can harm child-robot collaboration. Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children – IDC ’18, 195–206. DOI logoGoogle Scholar