Robot-mediated interviews--how effective is a humanoid robot as a tool for interviewing young children?

Robots have been used in a variety of education, therapy or entertainment contexts. This paper introduces the novel application of using humanoid robots for robot-mediated interviews. An experimental study examines how children's responses towards the humanoid robot KASPAR in an interview conte...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2013-03, Vol.8 (3), p.e59448-e59448
Main Authors: Wood, Luke Jai, Dautenhahn, Kerstin, Rainer, Austen, Robins, Ben, Lehmann, Hagen, Syrdal, Dag Sverre
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavior
Child
Child Behavior - physiology
Children
Children & youth
Computer Science
Criminal investigations
Data processing
Evidence
Eye movements
Female
Health care
Health care industry
Human behavior
Humanoid
Humans
Interview, Psychological - methods
Interviews
Language
Male
Personality
Police
Response time
Robotics
Robotics industry
Robots
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Social services
Studies
Witnesses
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Summary:Robots have been used in a variety of education, therapy or entertainment contexts. This paper introduces the novel application of using humanoid robots for robot-mediated interviews. An experimental study examines how children's responses towards the humanoid robot KASPAR in an interview context differ in comparison to their interaction with a human in a similar setting. Twenty-one children aged between 7 and 9 took part in this study. Each child participated in two interviews, one with an adult and one with a humanoid robot. Measures include the behavioural coding of the children's behaviour during the interviews and questionnaire data. The questions in these interviews focused on a special event that had recently taken place in the school. The results reveal that the children interacted with KASPAR very similar to how they interacted with a human interviewer. The quantitative behaviour analysis reveal that the most notable difference between the interviews with KASPAR and the human were the duration of the interviews, the eye gaze directed towards the different interviewers, and the response time of the interviewers. These results are discussed in light of future work towards developing KASPAR as an 'interviewer' for young children in application areas where a robot may have advantages over a human interviewer, e.g. in police, social services, or healthcare applications.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0059448