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Artificial intelligence has a new job: setting a good example for your kids. It seems that children’s behaviour can be influenced by the personality of a robot companion – playing with an enthusiastic or attentive robot, for instance, made them engage more and work harder.

Researchers ran a series of experiments with Tega, a companion robot that looks like a cross between a Furby and a Teletubby. To test how the robot’s personality could affect the children’s behaviour, they programmed the robot with different responses.

“The goal is to have a companion that has all of the behaviours that we want to instil and promote in the child,” says team member at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Forty children played a puzzle game against Tega. With half the children, the robot had a “neutral” personality, meaning that when it won it said something like “I solved the puzzle,” and when it lost it said something like “That was hard”. With the other half of the group, Tega had more of a can-do attitude. When it won, it might say “That was hard, but I tried hard and nailed it,” and when it lost it might say “You worked hard and succeeded!”

The differences in the robot’s personality were subtle, but the effect it had on the children’s reactions was not. “We found that the children in the second group tried much harder, and when they lost they were far more determined to win – they had grit,” says at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who led the research. These children made more attempts to solve the puzzles.

Listen like a child

The researchers also trialled Tega as a storytelling partner. From footage of 18 children telling stories in pairs, a machine learning algorithm identified the traits they displayed most often when being attentive. “We found that children really lean in and gaze at you when they’re engaged with a story. Adults don’t really do this, but for children it’s really important,” says Park.

Children then told a story to two identical Tega robots placed next to each other. One was programmed to listen like a child – leaning forward, nodding and smiling, and reacting more when the storyteller was more energetic – while the other listened in a more reserved way. In surveys, the children said they thought the childlike Tega was more attentive and they preferred telling it stories.

This was also evident in their behaviour. “When children sense attentiveness they tell longer stories with more complex narratives, and their vocabulary improves faster,” says Park.

Storytelling is important for child development, so it is exciting if a robot can encourage that, says at the Institute for Education, London. “We need to be careful though,” she says. “Not every child is the same, so in the future it would be good if the robots could tailor their behaviours to each child as well.”

We can’t know yet what impact a robot’s personality has on a child’s attitude to learning in the long term, says Park. The current findings could be partly down to a “novelty effect” from children first encountering this sort of robot. The team plans to explore longer-term effects in the future, and will present their work so far at a conference on in Vienna in March.

Gordon says they hope the robot will be useful at home and in the classroom. “The goal is for the robot to be a companion that can learn with the child and behave in a way that positively influences the child,” he says. “It can express that effort pays off and it likes challenges. We’ve shown that the child is influenced by this behaviour and will actually try harder after interactions with the robot.”

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