In a pilot study, the Pepper humanoid robot was more effective than a human in increasing participants' motivation while performing educational tasks. According to the researchers, in the future such robots will be able to take over some of the responsibilities of teachers, although they cannot completely replace them.
The research results were published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.
15 volunteers aged 16-40 participated in the experiment. They were asked to find the given objects in the images within a limited time, during which they received positive, neutral or negative comments from either the Pepper robot or a human. At the same time, a special eye movement tracking system recorded attention, engagement level and other indicators.
The analysis showed that the feedback given by the robot had a stronger effect on the participants' concentration than the human comments. On average, the subjects also performed slightly better on the tasks when Pepper gave the advice. Exceptions were the cases when the experiment ended with a negative evaluation. then the advantage of the robot is gone.
The researchers admitted that they expected the opposite result, as people generally trust other people more than machines. However, according to them, the participants may have felt more comfortable when they received the feedback from a robot rather than a human.
The authors emphasized that social robots should not replace teachers. They are considered as a tool that can help in individualized learning, keep students motivated and reduce the workload of educators. All decisions related to the use of artificial intelligence in education should remain under human control.
