Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In novel situations, the productive communicative behavior of shy children can require more time than that of their less shy peers. Investigating 14 preschoolers, we asked which situational demands and changes contribute to the individual processing. Whereas children's shyness was measured by a standardized questionnaire given to caregivers, their processing of situational demands was measured by their nonverbal turn-timing over two sessions with a social robot. We focused on how children respond to their partner when the situation changes in comparison to a familiar one. Our results, based on grouping children by shyness level, indicate that while differences in turn-timing were not significant, shy children's turn-timing was consistently characterized by higher latencies compared to the less shy children across sessions and tasks, particularly when introduced to a new task. Correlational analysis, accounting for the full shyness spectrum, confirmed this trend. Findings clarify how children perceive a situation and situational changes.