Social Robots as Physical Curiosity Assessment Tools

A novel use of social robots is introduced, namely, as an assessment tool for cognitive and social characteristics of human subjects. Social robots convey objectivity, repeatability and robustness which are highly important in assessment tools, and lacking in human and interaction-based methods. Here, we implement a fully autonomous social robot for the purpose of assessing physical curiosity of human subjects, namely, how do people explore novel physical-interaction scenarios. The complex interaction enables us to disambiguate learning, exploration and curiosity-based behaviors, where we show highly significant correlation between our extracted behavioral measures and external self-reported personality traits and Psychometric Entrance Test (PET) scores. Our results suggest that this novel experimental paradigm can be implemented in a host of social and physical assessment tasks.