Do Social Rewards from Robots Enhance Offline Improvements in Motor Skills?

In human-human interaction, praise is a fundamental social reward. Praise provides many benefits to people who receive it, such as positive feelings and improved motivation as well as on specific skills and performances. In this paper, we investigate whether praise from two robots influences offline improvements on the motor skills in a manner that resembles praise from humans. We conducted an experiment with 27 participants to investigate the relationships between the effects of social rewards and the number of robots, by using a sequential finger-tapping task which is used in a similar past research work. Our experiment results showed that people who received praise from two robots showed significantly better offline improvements on the motor skill improvement than people who did not receive such praise, but there is no significant differences between two robots and one robot. Moreover, questionnaire results showed higher degree of satisfaction and confidence towards robots' speech sentences when the robots provided praises.