As part of the cross-cultural project CULSHY (Cross-cultural studies on shyness: Experimental studies on gesture production of school-aged children and their nonverbal communicative behavior in a child-robot interaction) I am on a research stay at Waseda University in Tokyo from September to October.

In the project, led by Katharina Rohlfing and Kazuki Sekine, we are investigating the communicative behavior of preschool children towards social robots cross-culturally. During my research stay, we were able to test the study design and conduct first pilots.

I am pleased to announce that I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis “This is autumn red! Learning morphologically complex words with social robots: The influence of a systematic variation of the pragmatic frame on long-term word learning in 4-5 year old children”.

It has been a great journey of almost 5 years and I would like to express my deepest thankfulness to all the people involved in this special experience, especially my Ph.D. supervisor Prof. Dr. Katharina Rohlfing and Prof. Dr. Kerstin Fischer.

I had the honor of participating in an invited symposium at the 20th Biennial Conference of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI).

In the symposium “From access to impact: a quality perspective on early childhood digital education”, organized by Franziska Cohen, I presented a study in which we analyzed the multimodal behavior of preschool children when they encountered difficulties to recall a learned word while learning with a social robot. The results may help inform future dialog design between young children and robots.

Our paper ‘Dialogical roles of social robots for supporting children’s learning of language and literacy—a review and analysis of innovative roles’ was accepted for publication in Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

Together with Franziska Viertel, Matt Hilton, Kristie Poole, and Sarah Kucker I organized a Symposium at this year’s CogSci 2022!

In this endeavor, we have attempted to synthesize various disciplinary perspectives and cutting-edge findings on the topic of shyness in children. The symposium is available in the conference proceedings.

Our paper ‘Who is that?! Does  Changing  the  Robot  as  a Learning  Companion  Impact  Preschoolers’Language Learning?’ was accepted as a late-breaking report at HRI 2022.

I gave a flash talk at the event that focused on the potential of social robots in early childhood education. There is also a recording of the event and the talk (starting at 3:37:18).

For a half-hour radio report, I was interviewed together with Franziska Viertel about the research on the widespread temperamental characteristic of shyness and how shyness can influence the interactive behavior of children in different contexts.

The podcast (in German) can be found here: Shy but confident – Strengthening introverted children