After playing a five to seven minute character guessing game with a Nao robot, children answered questions about their perceptions of the robot’s abilities. Responses from interactions with 30 children, ages eight to twelve, showed that when the robot made an attempt at guessing the participant’s character, rather than being stumped and unable to guess, the robot was more likely to be perceived as being able to understand the participant’s feelings and able to provide advice. Regardless of their game experience, boys were more likely than girls to feel they could have discussions with the robot about things they could not talk to other people about. This article provides details associated with the implementation of a game used to guess a character the children selected; a twelve question verbally-administered survey that examined their perceptions of the robot; quantitative and qualitative results from the study; and a discussion of the implications, limitations, and future directions of this research.

The goal of this paper is to begin a discussion of the benefits, challenges, and ethical concerns related to the use of robots as intermediaries for obtaining sensitive information from children within the human-robot interaction (HRI), criminology, sociology, legal, and psychological communities. This work examines how robots may impede disclosures from children, encourage inaccurate disclosures, facilitate unintended disclosures, provide a more reliable interviewer, decrease the likelihood of misleading children, and enhance forensic interviews through high fidelity data logging. Open research questions, proposed research studies, and pathways toward deployment of robots as forensic interviewers are provided. As HRI researchers working in an interdisciplinary team, with members trained by the National Child Advocacy Center in Child Forensic Interview Protocols, we believe sustaining a dialogue concerning the design and appropriate use of robots in this area is essential for continued progress.

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