A review of empirical evidence on different uncanny valley hypotheses: support for perceptual mismatch as one road to the valley of eeriness

Abstract

The uncanny valley hypothesis, proposed already in the 1970s, suggests that almost but not fully humanlike artificial characters will trigger a profound sense of unease. This hypothesis has become widely acknowledged both in the popular media and scientific research. Surprisingly, empirical evidence for the hypothesis has remained inconsistent. In the present article, we reinterpret the original uncanny valley hypothesis and review empirical evidence for different theoretically motivated uncanny valley hypotheses. The uncanny valley could be understood as the naïve claim that any kind of human-likeness manipulation will lead to experienced negative affinity at close-to-realistic levels. More recent hypotheses have suggested that the uncanny valley would be caused by artificial–human categorization difficulty or by a perceptual mismatch between artificial and human features. Original formulation also suggested that movement would modulate the uncanny valley. The reviewed empirical literature failed to provide consistent support for the naïve uncanny valley hypothesis or the modulatory effects of movement. Results on the categorization difficulty hypothesis were still too scarce to allow drawing firm conclusions. In contrast, good support was found for the perceptual mismatch hypothesis. Taken together, the present review findings suggest that the uncanny valley exists only under specific conditions. More research is still needed to pinpoint the exact conditions under which the uncanny valley phenomenon manifests itself.

When categorization-based stranger avoidance explains the uncanny valley: A comment on MacDorman and Chattopadhyay (2016)

“…Actually, our theory relies on the perception of object appearance improbability to determine how novel an object category is. The evaluation of the appearance improbability is consistent with the evaluation of the realism inconsistency (MacDorman & Chattopadhyay, 2016) or perceptual mismatch (Brenton, Gillies, Ballin, & Chatting, 2005;MacDorman, Green, Ho, & Koch, 2009;Kätsyri, Förger, Mäkäräinen, & Takala, 2015). On the other hand, our theory posits that after recognizing the improbable appearance, the brain categorizes the object into a novel class and recognizes the object as a stranger to be avoided.…”

Mindless Robots get Bullied

“…Anthropomorphism has been operationalised in many di erent ways by di erent researchers [27,51]: from the humanness subscale of the revised Godspeed questionnaire [24], which quite straightforwardly asks the participant to rate the robots on scales like 'living versus inanimate' and 'humanmade versus humanlike' [41,67]; to home-cra ed questionnaires [15,49,50]; to mind a ribution questionnaires [12,14,64] and UH and HN a ribution measurements [37,52], which hold the (implicit) assumption of dehumanisation and anthropomorphism being each others opposite. is makes it virtually impossible to tease apart anthropomorphism, dehumanisation, and mind a ribution in the literature.…”

The Interactive Effects of Robot Anthropomorphism and Robot Ability on Perceived Threat and Support for Robotics Research

“…The uncanny valley hypothesis is often used to explain the rejection of humanlike robots and virtual agents. The existence of the uncanny valley continues to be a topic of active discussion (Bartneck, Kanda, Ishiguro, & Hagita, 2007;Kätsyri, Förger, Mäkäräinen, & Takala, 2015;MacDorman & Chattopadhyay, 2016;Rosenthal-von der Pütten & Krämer, 2015;Wang, Lilienfeld, & Rochat, 2015;Złotowski, Proudfoot, & Bartneck, 2013). Several explanations have been proposed as to why people reject highly-humanlike robots.…”