Spatial understanding and communication are essential skills in human interaction. An adequate understanding of others’ spatial perspectives can increase the quality of the interaction, both perceptually and cognitively. In this paper, we take the first step towards understanding children’s perspective-taking abilities and their tendency to adapt their perspective to a counterpart while completing a task with a robot. The elements used for studying children’s behaviours are the frame of reference and perspective marking, which we evaluated through a task where players needed to compose instructions to guide each other to complete the task. We developed the interaction with an NAO robot and analyzed the children’s instructions and their performance throughout the game. Our initial findings demonstrated that children tend to compose their first instruction by following the principle of least collaborative effort. Children significantly changed and adapted their perspective, i.e. frame of reference and perspective marking to the robot, mainly when the robot failed to follow their instructions correctly. Additionally, results show that children tend to create a mental model of their counterparts and the robot changing that frame of reference might affect their performance or the flow of the interaction.

To be considered socially intelligent, agents must be able to adjust their behavior to different social contexts. However, those adjustments must be recognized and understood by other agents and humans, particularly to identify the social motivations that triggered such changes. In this work, we report on an experimental study that explores how external observers attribute social motivations to behavior and appearance changes that agents make to adapt to the context. Furthermore, we study how the presence of other agents in the context might impact the attribution of motivations to specific changes. Our results indicate that participants identify agents’ appearance changes as more socially and spatially motivated than behavioral changes. Additionally, agents’ awareness is rated higher when the agents adjust their physical characteristics compared to behavioral changes.

Recent studies with children have pointed out the importance of spatial thinking as an essential factor in determining later success in STEM-related fields. The current study explores the potential of using embodied activities with robots to aid the development of children’s spatial perspective-taking abilities. This research focuses on evaluating children’s spatial perspective-taking abilities and assessing the potential of the designed activity to practice perspective-taking. The activity design is inspired by the dynamic and mental processes involved in remote-controlled cars and racing games, it is developed with a Cozmo robot, and it includes guiding the robot within the maze by considering the robot’s point of view. We evaluated the activity through a user study with 22 elementary school children between the ages of 8 and 9. The findings showed that children’s performance at different angular disparities was aligned with the previous research in developmental psychology. Additionally, most children made fewer mistakes in guiding the robot as they played more. Finally, while we did not observe any performance improvement in the group of children who had access to the robot’s point of view during the game, we learned new insights about how children perceived seeing the maze through the robot’s eyes.

Research on child-agent interaction is rapidly expanding. It is, therefore, necessary to converge our collective efforts to broaden our understanding and perspectives of how virtual agents, affect and potentially improve the well-being of children. “Children, Robots and Virtual Agents: Present and Future Challenges” follows our International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) 2020 workshop on child-robot interactions. In this full-day workshop, we will focus on the unique technical and empirical challenges of designing and conducting child-agent interactions. In light of the current pandemic situation, we will also address the challenges and adaptations of conducting research under the “new normal” to understand how researchers overcome these challenges and what we can learn and keep in the future. We also aim to join the virtual agents and robotics communities to learn from each other and discuss both areas’ common and specific challenges. Our primary goal is to provide an opportunity for an interdisciplinary debate about the present and future of child-agent interactions. We want to bring together researchers, practitioners and pioneers from relevant disciplines and create collaboration opportunities. As part of the workshop, we will have a collaborative activity where our participants will work together and brainstorm about intelligent agents in different time frames (past, present and future). We will also have a panel of experts discussing the topics of this workshop and answering participants questions.

Social agents should exhibit socially adequate behavior to fit the context they meet. Fitting the context is particular relevant for interactive agents that interact and are being observed by people. Hence, the perceptions of people of such social capabilities are an important concern. Exhibiting socially adequate behavior can more easily be identifiable when in the presence of other social actors. However, even alone, one’s ability to adjust to the context might be socially motivated and interpreted as such. Similarly, intelligent agents may be identified as social beings when acting alone. Moreover, social context is triggered in different ways. In this study, we explore if adaptation to the physical surroundings (e.g., the agent’s location) is enough to shape the perceptions of people observing the agent. We contribute to the study of situated cognition’s role in interpreting an autonomous agent’s behavior. In particular, we explore the impact of behavior changes grounded on the location as a contextual cue on the motivation ascribed by an observer to the agent’s behavior.

Geometry and handwriting rely heavily on the visual representation of basic shapes. It can become challenging for students with visual impairments to perceive these shapes and understand complex spatial constructs. For instance, knowing how to draw is highly dependent on spatial and temporal components, which are often inaccessible to children with visual impairments. Hand-held robots, such as the Cellulo robots, open unique opportunities to teach drawing and writing through haptic feedback. In this paper, we investigate how these tangible robots could support inclusive, collaborative learning activities, particularly for children with visual impairments. We conducted a user study with 20 pupils with and without visual impairments, where they engaged in multiple drawing activities with tangible robots. We contribute novel insights on the design of children-robot interaction, learning shapes and letters, children engagement, and responses in a collaborative scenario that address the challenges of inclusive learning.

This paper presents the results of a user study designed to investigate social robots' persuasiveness. In the design, the robot attempts to persuade users in two different conditions comparing to a control condition. In one condition, the robot aims at persuading users by giving them a reward. In the second condition, the robot tries to persuade by punishing users. The results indicated that the robot succeeded to persuade the users to select a less-desirable choice comparing to a better one. However, no difference was found in the perception of the robot's warmth nor discomfort, comparing the two strategies. The results suggest that social robots are capable of persuading users objectively, but further investigation is required to investigate persuasion subjectively.