HRI 2026 | Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
↓Maria Teresa Parreira* ¹ · Isabel Neto* ² · Filipa Rocha²³ · Wendy Ju¹⁴
¹Cornell University · ²Lasige, Faculdade de Ciências · ³ITI/LarSys, Universidade de Lisboa · ⁴Cornell Tech
*Equal contribution
- Interruption Condition (n=30): Robot interrupts child before they finish answering
- Control Condition (n=29): Robot does not interrupt
- All participants experienced 3 successive performance errors
- Robot: Simon (Nodbot) - simple 2-axis robot with speaker
- Control: Wizard-of-Oz methodology
- Recording: 2 cameras (room view + laptop webcam)
- Introduction to robot Simon
- Video visualization task (6 short videos with robots/humans, successes/failures)
- Pre-interaction robot perception survey (5-point Likert scale)
- Social error manipulation (interruption or control during Q&A)
- Performance error: 3 successive failures to understand "call the researcher" command
- Post-interaction robot perception survey
- Debriefing and deception explanation
Session duration: ~7 minutes
How do children perceive and react to repeated robot error?
To investigate this question, we examine children's responses to two types of robot failures:
- Social Error (Interruption): Robot inappropriately interrupts the child during conversation, violating social norms
- Performance Error (Successive Failure): Robot fails to understand the child's request to "call the researcher" three successive times
Like adults (Liu et al., 2025), children demonstrated:
- ✅ Verbal adaptation: Modified prompts (repeating, simplifying, adding specificity) and adjusted vocal tone/cadence (slower speech, demanding/interrogative tones)
- 📈 Emotional progression: Similar evolution from confusion to frustration across successive errors
- ⏱️ Response timing: Increased response latencies and variability with successive failures
- 🚪 Interaction abandonment: Some participants completely discontinued interaction by the third error
Children exhibited distinct behavioral patterns:
- 🔴 Greater disengagement: Children showed notably more disengagement behaviors, often temporarily ignoring the robot
- 🙋 External help-seeking ("Calling for Backup"): Unlike adults who attempted self-directed problem-solving, children looked for or called the researcher, demonstrating different agency expectations
- 🙏 Politeness strategies: Children more readily shifted to polite language forms ("please") when initial commands failed
- ⚡ Earlier disengagement: Children showed disengagement beginning at Error I, while adults primarily abandoned after Error III (n=7)
- 🔄 Mixed engagement patterns: Children displayed more dynamic patterns, sometimes disengaging then re-engaging, unlike the more linear adult progression
- 84% of children (21/25) in the Interruption condition shifted their answer to the new question, not acknowledging the interruption
- Only 2 children continued responding to the previous question
- Children appeared oblivious to or unconcerned with interruption as a social violation
No significant changes in robot perception across any measured dimension:
- Willingness to continue interacting
- Competence
- Trust
- Social acceptance
- Likeability
This suggests children have more flexible conversational expectations with robots compared to adults.
Most common engagement trajectories (Error I → Error II → Error III):
- Engage → Engage → Engage (n=15)
- Engage → Disengage → Engage (n=5)
- Engage → Disengage → Disengage (n=4)
Response categories observed:
- Verbal reprompting: Repeating, more specific/longer prompts, simpler prompts, term swapping
- Vocal modifications: Slower speech, demanding tone, interrogative tone, assertive tone, filler words
- Physical behaviors: Moving closer to robot, standing up, leaving room
- Emotional displays: Confusion, frustration, amusement/humor
- Disengagement: Looking for researcher, no prompt, quitting interaction
| Observed Behavior | Design Implication |
|---|---|
| Children's perception remained stable despite successive errors | Design for Error Tolerance: Focus on managing errors gracefully rather than aggressively eliminating them. Allow minor errors without elaborate apologies. |
| Children frequently call for adult help after repeated failures | Facilitate External Help-Seeking: Recognize requests for human assistance as valid and implement graceful handoff mechanisms. |
| Children use sophisticated verbal strategies (repetition, specificity, politeness) | Implement Multi-Layered Conversational Repair: Design systems sensitive to prompt reformulation and increase error confidence based on politeness markers. |
| Children exhibit dynamic engagement patterns | Employ Non-Intrusive Error Recovery: Recognize disengagement as active problem-solving. Avoid intrusive re-engagement; monitor passively. |
| Response latencies increase with successive errors | Utilize Timing as Failure Metric: Integrate response latency analysis as real-time measure of cognitive load and distress. |
.
├── docs/ # Project website files
│ ├── index.html # Main website page
│ ├── style.css # Website styling
│ ├── README.md # Website documentation
│ ├── figures/ # All images and video
│ │ ├── badchild_videofigure.mp4 # Main video vignette
│ │ ├── collage_p*.png # Participant vignettes
│ │ ├── doodle_*.png # Behavioral illustrations
│ │ ├── experimental_setup.png # Study setup
│ │ └── vignette_p*.png # Additional examples
│ └── submission/ # Paper PDFs
│ ├── manuscript_calling4backup.pdf
│ └── supp_material_calling4backup.pdf
├── submission/ # Original submission materials
│ ├── manuscript_calling4backup.pdf
│ ├── supp_material_calling4backup.pdf
│ └── figures/ # Paper figures
└── README.md # This file
- 📄 Paper: submission/manuscript_calling4backup.pdf
- 📑 Supplementary Material: submission/supp_material_calling4backup.pdf
- 🎥 Video Figures: Available in docs/figures/
- 🌐 Project Website: https://irl-ct.github.io/calling-for-backup/
successive error · robot error · reproducibility · child-robot interaction · error recovery · performance error · social error
@inproceedings{parreira2026calling,
title={Calling for Backup: How Children Navigate Successive Robot Communication Failures},
author={Parreira, Maria Teresa and Neto, Isabel and Rocha, Filipa and Ju, Wendy},
booktitle={TBD},
year={2026},This study reproduces and extends the successive robot failure paradigm from:
- Liu, S., Parreira, M. T., & Ju, W. (2025). "I'm Done": Describing Human Reactions to Successive Robot Failure. HRI 2025.
For questions about this research, please contact the authors:
- Maria Teresa Parreira: mb2554@cornell.edu
- Isabel Neto: aineto@fc.ul.pt
© 2026 Authors. Licensed under Cornell University IRB exempt protocol #IRB0010006.