Improving human-human collaboration between children with a social robot

Despite the growing body of research in human-robot collaboration, there has been little focus on how social robots can support human-to-human teaming. In this paper, we investigate whether a social robot can improve human-human collaboration. We conducted a between-subjects study where pairs of children play a collaborative game with a social robot. During pauses in the game, the robot either (1) asks the children questions to better focus the participants on the task they are working on, (2) asks the children questions that are targeted at developing and reinforcing the relationship between the participants, or (3) doesn't ask any questions. Our results show that participants who were asked task-focused questions had higher performance scores in the collaborative game than the other groups, however, had a lower perception of their performance than the participants who were asked relationally-focused questions. We did not find any differences between the groups in interpersonal cohesiveness. Our findings suggest that social robots can be used to improve performance measures and perception of performance in groups of children.