Robot Role Design for Implementing Social Facilitation Theory in Musical Instruments Practicing

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The application of social robots has recently been explored in various types of educational settings including music learning. Earlier research presented evidence that simply the presence of a robot can influence a person’s task performance, confirming social facilitation theory and findings in human-robot interaction. Confirming the evaluation apprehension theory, earlier studies showed that next to a person’s presence, also that person’s social role could influence a user’s performance: the presence of a (non-) evaluative other can influence the user’s motivation and performance differently. To be able to investigate that, researchers need the roles for the robot which is missing now. In the current research, we describe the design of two social roles (i.e., evaluative role and non-evaluative role) of a robot that can have different appearances. For this, we used the SocibotMini: A robot with a projected face, allowing diversity and great flexibility of human-like social cue presentation. An empirical study at a real practice room including 20 participants confirmed that users (i.e., children) evaluated the robot roles as intended. Thereby, the current research provided the robot roles allowing to study whether the presence of social robots in certain social roles can stimulate practicing behavior and suggestions of how such roles can be designed and improved. Future studies can investigate how the presence of a social robot in a certain social role can stimulate children to practice.