Child–robot interaction across cultures: How does playing a game with a social robot compare to playing a game alone or with a friend?

• We examine the effect of culture (individualistic vs. collectivisitic) and age in child–robot interaction.
• 8 Years old children are more positive about their interaction with a robot than 12 year old children.
• While interacting with a robot, Pakistani children are more expressive than Dutch ones.
• Children playing a game with a friend are more expressive than those playing with a robot.
• The factors culture, and age are crucial for designing better child–robot interactions.

The present study investigates how children from two different cultural backgrounds (Pakistani, Dutch) and two different age groups (8 and 12 year olds) experience interacting with a social robot (iCat) during collaborative game play. We propose a new method to evaluate children’s interaction with such a robot, by asking whether playing a game with a state-of-the-art social robot like the iCat is more similar to playing this game alone or with a friend. A combination of self-report scores, perception test results and behavioral analyses indicate that child–robot interaction in game playing situations is highly appreciated by children, although more by Pakistani and younger children than by Dutch and older children. Results also suggest that children enjoyed playing with the robot more than playing alone, but enjoyed playing with a friend even more. In a similar vein, we found that children were more expressive in their non-verbal behavior when playing with the robot than when they were playing alone, but less expressive than when playing with a friend. Our results not only stress the importance of using new benchmarks for evaluating child–robot interaction but also highlight the significance of cultural differences for the design of social robots.