The uncanniness of written text is explained by configural deviation and not by processing disfluency

Abstract

Deviating from human norms in human-looking artificial entities can elicit uncanny sensations, described as the uncanny valley. This study investigates in three tasks whether configural deviation in written text also increases uncanniness. It further evaluates whether the uncanniness of text is better explained by perceptual disfluency and especially deviations from specialized categories, or conceptual disfluency caused by ambiguity. In the first task, lower sentence readability predicted uncanniness, but deviating sentences were more uncanny than typical sentences despite being just as readable. Furthermore, familiarity with a language increased the effect of configural deviation on uncanniness but not the effect of non-configural deviation (blur). In the second and third tasks, semantically ambiguous words and sentences were not uncannier than typical sentences, but deviating, non-ambiguous sentences were. Deviations from categories with specialized processing mechanisms thus better fit the observed results as an explanation of the uncanny valley than ambiguity-based explanations.