A Wizard-of-Oz study of curiosity in human-robot interaction

Service robots are becoming a widespread tool for assisting humans in scientific, industrial and even domestic settings. Yet, our understanding of how to motivate and sustain interactions between human users and robots remains limited. In this work, we conducted a study to investigate how surprising robot behaviour evokes curiosity and influences trust and engagement in the context of participants interacting with Recyclo, a service robot for providing recycling recommendations. In a Wizard-of-Oz experiment, 36 participants were asked to interact with Recyclo to recognize and sort a variety of objects, and were given object recognition responses that were either unsurprising or surprising. Results show that surprise gave rise to information seeking behavior indicative of curiosity, while having a positive influence on engagement and negative influence on trust.