The Uncanny Valley Phenomenon and the Temporal Dynamics of Face Animacy Perception

2022

Journal of Vision

The uncanny valley predicts aversive reactions toward near-humanlike entities. Greater uncanniness is elicited by distortions in realistic than unrealistic faces, possibly due to familiarity. Experiment 1 investigated how familiarity and inversion affect uncanniness of facial distortions and the ability to detect differences between the distorted variants of the same face (distortion sensitivity). Familiar or unfamiliar celebrity faces were incrementally distorted and presented either upright or inverted. Uncanniness ratings increased across the distortion levels, and were stronger for familiar and upright faces. Distortion sensitivity increased with increasing distortion difference levels, again stronger for familiar and upright faces. Experiment 2 investigated how face realism, familiarity, and face orientation interacted for the increase of uncanniness across distortions. Realism increased the increase of uncanniness across the distortion levels, further enhanced by upright orientation and familiarity. The findings show that familiarity, upright orientation, and high face realism increase the sensitivity of uncanniness, likely by increasing distortion sensitivity. Finally, a moderated linear function of face realism and deviation level could explain the uncanniness of stimuli better than a quadratic function. A re-interpretation of the uncanny valley as sensitivity toward deviations from familiarized patterns is discussed.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Familiarity, orientation, and realism increase face uncanniness by sensitizing to facial distortions

Diel¹,

2022

Journal of Vision

“…Some theories on the uncanny valley explain uncanniness through changes in animacy perception [ 10 , 34 – 37 ]: stimuli may be uncanny because they straddle boundaries of animacy perception, or because they are “dehumanized” through a subtraction of animacy perception. Past research associated greeble expertise training with animacy [ 72 ], and it has been argued that greebles already look animate [ 73 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mate selection theories propose that uncanniness of deviating features is caused by an evolutionary mechanism to avoid potential mates with bad fitness, and threat avoidance theory proposes that the uncanny valley is part of a mechanism to detect and avoid indicators of contagious disease [ 8 ]. Other theories of the uncanny valley focus on the perception of mind or animacy,or lack thereof [ 34 – 36 ], the detection of possibly dangerous (malevolent) intention in another human actor [ 9 ], or dehumanization of near humanlike entities [ 10 , 37 ]. Thus, several theories presuppose human (or animal) specificity of the uncanny valley.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The deviation-from-familiarity effect: Expertise increases uncanniness of deviating exemplars

Diel

2022

PLoS ONE

Humanlike entities deviating from the norm of human appearance are perceived as strange or uncanny. Explanations for the eeriness of deviating humanlike entities include ideas specific to human or animal stimuli like mate selection, avoidance of threat or disease, or dehumanization; however, deviation from highly familiar categories may provide a better explanation. Here it is tested whether experts and novices in a novel (greeble) category show different patterns of abnormality, attractiveness, and uncanniness responses to distorted and averaged greebles. Greeble-trained participants assessed the abnormality, attractiveness, uncanniness of normal, averaged, and distorted greebles and their responses were compared to participants who had not previously seen greebles. The data show that distorted greebles were more uncanny than normal greebles only in the training condition, and distorted greebles were more uncanny in the training compared to the control condition. In addition, averaged greebles were not more attractive than normal greebles regardless of condition. The results suggest uncanniness is elicited by deviations from stimulus categories of expertise rather than being a purely biological human- or animal-specific response.

“…Despite decades of research, the cognitive processes underlying this phenomenon, the uncanny valley, are not well understood. Various theories on the uncanny valley presume the effect is specific to human beings or animals, some of which are reviewed here: Dehumanization theory proposes that the initial attribution of mind to a non-human anthropomorphic face in the early stages of processing and its removal in later stages elicits a negative experience (Wang et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2015). Misattribution theories predict that ascribing human qualities like animacy or mind to entities recognized as non-human (or inanimate) elicits uncanniness (Gray & Wegner, 2012;Stein & Ohler, 2017).…”

Section: Uncanny Valley and Uncanninessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Various theories predict that uncanniness results from anomalies in human-specific processing (Stein & Ohler, 2017;Wang et al, 2020). However, the face stimuli used in studies investigating human-specific processes have been variants deviating from typical facial appearance.…”

Section: Human-specificity Of Uncanninessmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Diel

2022

Perception

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.