Social Robots in Learning Scenarios: Useful Tools to Improve Students' Attention or Potential Sources of Distraction?

In this paper, we speculate about the use of social robots as convenient tools for improving learning in an educational scenario. We introduce an experimental setup in which students listen a story read by a storyteller while their attention levels are monitored through electrophysiological and behavioral measures: if the participants are judged inattentive by an electroencephalogram based measure or by the head’s movements, a social robot will produce feedbacks to stimulate their attention to the shared task. We hypothesize that the participants will then realize their attention drop and will shift back their focus to the task, improving their learning. A comprehension questionnaire together with the score of a Narrative Transport Questionnaire, joined with the analysis of the collected electrophysiological data are explored to verify the effectiveness of this approach. First results with 16 adult students indicate how in learning scenarios social robots could act as a potential elements of distraction.