Parle: A Curious Robot

"Parle: A Curious Robot." Goren Gorden's name appears where we would usually get author's credit; Personal Robots Group site. As of August 2024, available here.[1]

Brief summary of an intriguing and relevant experiment from robotics and psychological/pedagogical research at MIT.

This project aimed to test whether children can “catch” curiosity from a social robot. In other words, does playing with a robot that behaves like a curious child make children more curious. So we invited children to play a tablet game with Parle, the DragonBot. Parle, a Personalized Assistive Robot that Learns English, behaved like a curious child, expressing enthusiasm of learning and exploration. We found that indeed, Parle’s curiosity was “contagious”: children playing with it were more curious after the interaction, compared to children playing with a non-curious robot.

Cf. and contrast fictional Zander TV series.

The possibility of a curious robot is a motif in SF and useful in philosophical discussion of what might make a robot fully sentient and human-like.

RDE, finishing 3Aug24