The Effect of Robot vs. Human Corrective Feedback on Children's Intrinsic Motivation

Several HRI studies have investigated the use of interactive social robots to enhance a variety of activities designed for children in recent years. Notably, these robots have shown the ability to facilitate greater engagement with rehabilitative therapy exercises. Yet, very few studies have directly compared the performance of a robotic therapist with that of a human therapist during therapy sessions. This type of analysis is even less common for studies involving children. This work presents the experimental results of a between subjects study conducted with 10 children who interacted with either a robot or human therapist while playing a virtual reality rehabilitation game. The results are analyzed in terms of user intrinsic motivation and compared to previous work with adult participants. Preliminary results show a trend that children enjoyed working with the robot therapist more than the human therapist while playing the game. This finding is consistent with related work within the domain of child-robot interaction and supports the continued investigation of the potential uses of social robots in therapeutic rehabilitation protocols for children.