Making Memories Together: Toward Transparent and Co-constructed Robot Memory in Child-Robot Interaction

Long-term child-robot interaction depends on sustaining both relational continuity and accurate, meaningful memory over time. In a one-year follow-up with 50 children from a personalized reading-support robot study, we found that children felt less close to the robot and half of the robot’s stored profile content was outdated or missing, revealing three challenges for long-term CRI: relationship decay, informational decay, and opaque robot memory, where children cannot check or influence what the robot remembers about them. A brief web-based “reconnect” repaired both informational and relationship decay, and revealed children’s strong interest in having more agency over the robot’s memory. Building on these insights, we propose Open-Memory Robots: agents whose memory is more transparent and co-constructed with the child, supporting continuity, appropriate trust, and children’s agency in CRI.