Expression of Curiosity in Social Robots: Design, Perception, and Effects on Behaviour

Curiosity–the intrinsic desire for new information–can enhance learning, memory, and exploration. Therefore, understanding how to elicit curiosity can inform the design of educational technologies. In this work, we investigate how a social peer robot's verbal expression of curiosity is perceived, whether it can affect the emotional feeling and behavioural expression of curiosity in students, and how it impacts learning. In a between-subjects experiment, 30 participants played the game LinkIt!, a game we designed for teaching rock classification, with a robot verbally expressing: curiosity, curiosity plus rationale, or no curiosity. Results indicate that participants could recognize the robot's curiosity and that curious robots produced both emotional and behavioural curiosity contagion effects in participants.