Exploring Multidimensional Trust : Shaping Child-Robot Creative Collaborations in Education

Abstract: As trust plays a pivotal role in maintaining long-term interactions between children and robots, it is vital to comprehend how children conceptualise trust and the factors influencing their trust in robots. This thesis examines the impact of social robots' behaviours and attributes on children's trust, relationship formation, and task performance in collaborative educational scenarios. A systematic review of child-robot interaction (cHRI) literature identified two primary dimensions of trust: social trust and competency trust. The literature suggests a lack of consensus about how different robot behaviours and attributes affect these two dimensions of trust, as evidence points to different directions. To address these gaps, a collaborative storytelling game was developed to facilitate interactions between children and social robots, aiming to study trust dynamics and enhance learning by fostering children's creativity. The research also examined the impact of robot-related factors, such as behaviour and appearance, on children's interactions with robots. Empirical evidence suggests that while making robots look and behave more like humans is critical for competency trust and task performance, lower human-like attributes are more crucial for developing social trust and relationship formation with robots. Other factors, like time, provide insights into children's trust dynamics. Thus, this thesis explores the role of repeated interactions with artificial agents, indicating that children's competency trust in robots changes over time. This thesis offers significant contributions to the cHRI community. Firstly, it demonstrates that trust is a multidimensional construct that is complex to capture, highlighting the need for reliable, objective measures tailored to the task and intended trust dimension. Secondly, it emphasises the importance of balancing human likeness with social robots when collaborating with children in educational scenarios. Lastly, it proposes that to sustain trustworthy long-term interactions in education; social robots should adapt their behaviour to provide scaffolding, as children will be more inclined to rely on them for learning support as time progresses.