Exploring the Role of Perspective Taking in Educational Child-Robot Interaction

Perspective taking is an important skill to have and learn, which can be applied in many different domains and disciplines. While the ability to recognize other’s perspective develops in humans from childhood and solidifies during school years, it needs to be developed in robotic and artificial agents’ cognitive framework. In our quest to develop a cognitive model of perspective taking for agents and robots in educational contexts, we designed a task that requires the players (e.g., child and robot) to take the perspective of another, in order to complete and win the task successfully. In a preliminary study to test the system, we were able to evaluate children’s performance over four different age groups by focusing on their performance during the interaction with the robot. By analyzing children’s performance, we were able to make some assumptions about children’s understanding of the game and select the appropriate age group to participate in the main study.