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Do Shy Children Keep more Distance from a Social Robot? Exploring Shy Children’s Proxemics with a Social Robot or a Human

Social robots hold potential for implementation in future educational environments by engaging children in motivating and embodied learning settings. However, how children enter into and maintain social interactions is substantially influenced by their individual differences. In this paper, we address children’s temperamental trait of shyness and explore how it influences children’s proxemic behavior in a long-term interaction involving language learning with either a social robot or a human. We operationalized proxemics by measuring children’s time spent in four different proxemic zones during the interaction. Overall, our results highlight that shy children approach the interaction partner in a more distant way when compared with less shy peers. When both interaction partners (robot and human) were compared with each other, however, our findings suggest that shy children display similar proxemic behavior. Findings are discussed with regard to the role of shyness during children’s interactions with social robots and the implications for future interaction design.