Rapport with a Social, Teachable Robot
Completed 2019–2020
Modelling how middle school students build interpersonal closeness with a teachable robot over repeated sessions.
- Where
- University of Pittsburgh
- With
- Erin Walker, Nichola Lubold, Leah Friedman
This project studied middle school students' rapport (interpersonal closeness) with a social, teachable robot across multiple sessions. Prior research had investigated the effects of social robots on rapport and learning in a single session, but little was known about how individuals build rapport with a robot over time.
We modelled learners' rapport-building linguistic strategies to understand whether the ways middle school students build rapport with a robot follow the same trends as human conversation, and how individual differences might mediate that rapport.