Abstract

An increasing amount of research has started
to explore the impact of robot social behaviour on the
outcome of a goal for a human interaction partner, such
as cognitive learning gains. However, it remains unclear
from what principles the social behaviour for such robots
should be derived. Human models are often used, but
in this paper an alternative approach is proposed. First,
the concept of nonverbal immediacy from the communication
literature is introduced, with a focus on how it
can provide a characterisation of social behaviour, and
the subsequent outcomes of such behaviour. A literature
review is conducted to explore the impact on learning
of the social cues which form the nonverbal immediacy
measure. This leads to the production of a series
of guidelines for social robot behaviour. The resulting
behaviour is evaluated in a more general context, where
both children and adults judge the immediacy of humans
and robots in a similar manner, and their recall of
a short story is tested. Children recall more of the story
when the robot is more immediate, which demonstrates
an e�ffect predicted by the literature. This study provides
validation for the application of nonverbal immediacy
to child-robot interaction. It is proposed that nonverbal
immediacy measures could be used as a means of
characterising robot social behaviour for human-robot
interaction.