How Should a Social Robot Deliver Negative Feedback Without Creating Distance Between the Robot and Child Users?

Research suggest negative feedback could guide users’ behaviours effectively in Human-AI interactions. However, providing negative feedback, relative to positive counterparts, can be more challenging in any type of communication. This paper delves into the potential of a social robot in delivering negative feedback for improving the in-class learning experience for children. With child participants (12 and younger), we conducted three co-design studies to investigate their preferred facial expressions of a social robot, Haru, which can identify them being distracted (i.e., undesirable behaviour), and redirect their attention back to their task with the facial expressions. Altogether, results indicated that children do not want to see conventional punishing expressions (e.g., angry faces) as a reaction to their undesirable behaviour. Instead, they preferred pleasant ones (e.g., funny, cute). Further, the importance of using realistic stimuli for studies and the co-design approach, as well as the challenges of interpreting children’s drawing responses, are discussed.

Cite: Yumiko Sakamoto, Anuradha Herath, Tanvi Vuradi, Samar Sallam, Randy Gomez, and Pourang Irani. 2023. How Should a Social Robot Deliver Negative Feedback Without Creating Distance Between the Robot and Child Users? In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI ‘23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 325–334. https://doi.org/10.1145/3623809.3623882