"I have an idea!": enhancing children's verbal creativity through repeated interactions with a virtual robot

Abstract

In the context of child development, practice is recognised as one of the essential activities to stimulate creativity. Here we aimed to explore whether repeated interactions with a virtual social robot could help build up children's creative performance over time. To this end, we developed an interactive storytelling game with the virtual robot Furhat. Twenty-five children between 9- and 12- years old played the online game two times with seven days of zero exposure in between. Our results revealed that repeated encounters have mixed effects on verbal creativity: while children were more creative in terms of flexibility, fluency, and elaboration in the second interaction, the level of originality remained stagnant. Moreover, the second encounter positively affected children's collaboration with and social behaviour toward the virtual robot. These results provide valuable evidence supporting the potential of multiple interactions with artificial agents to foster children's creativity over time. This paper, thus, provides readers with (1) a novel approach to stimulating verbal creativity through practice with artificial agents, (2) an assessment of the creative process in repeated interactions, and (3) evidence of how the behaviour of the robot influences children's creativity and their behaviour over time.