Secret-sharing: Interactions between a child, robot, and adult

This paper presents preliminary research investigating whether preschool children (ages four to six years old) would be as comfortable sharing a secret they had been told not to share, with a humanoid robot as they would an adult, to explore the possible future use of robots to gather sensitive information from children that may have experienced maltreatment. The children in this research played the game “follow-the-leader” with an adult and a humanoid robot. As part of this research, the lead investigator shared a unique secret with each child. During a break in the “follow-the-leader” game with the adult and the robot, the children were prompted with five questions to determine if they would share the secret they were told by the investigator. The qualitative results from the study indicate that the children were as likely to share the secret with the robot as the adult with a similar amount of prompting effort. Additionally, the children interacted with the robot using similar social conventions (e.g., greeting, turn-taking, etc) as observed in their interactions with the adult.