The thing that should not be: predictive coding and the uncanny valley in perceiving human and humanoid robot actions

2011/04/22 by Ayşe Pınar Saygın, Thierry Chaminade, Hiroshi Ishiguro +2 · 7 citations
Psychology · Neuroscience · #Action Observation and Synchronization #Embodied and Extended Cognition #Social Robot Interaction and HRI

paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/scan/nsr025

openalex publication_date 2011/04/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) repetition suppression, we explored the selectivity of the human action perception system (APS), which consists of temporal, parietal and frontal areas, for the appearance and/or motion of the perceived agent. Participants watched body movements of a human (biological appearance and movement), a robot (mechanical appearance and movement) or an android (biological appearance, mechanical movement). With the exception of extrastriate body area, which showed more suppression for human like appearance, the APS was not selective for appearance or motion per se. Instead, distinctive responses were found to the mismatch between appearance and motion: whereas suppression effects for the human and robot were similar to each other, they were stronger for the android, notably in bilateral anterior intraparietal sulcus, a key node in the APS. These results could reflect increased prediction error as the brain negotiates an agent that appears human, but does not move biologically, and help explain the 'uncanny valley' phenomenon.

Citations

• Android science: conscious and subconscious recognition
• The Uncanny Valley: Effect of Realism on the Impression of Artificial Human Faces
• Socially intelligent robots: dimensions of human–robot interaction
• Neural Circuits Involved in the Recognition of Actions Performed by Nonconspecifics: An fMRI Study
• Human parietal cortex in action
• THE MIRROR-NEURON SYSTEM

Cited by

• A review of empirical evidence on different uncanny valley hypotheses: support for perceptual mismatch as one road to the valley of eeriness
• A Bayesian explanation of the ‘Uncanny Valley’ effect and related psychological phenomena
• Familiar faces rendered strange: Why inconsistent realism drives characters into the uncanny valley
• Uncanny valley as a window into predictive processing in the social brain
• Reducing consistency in human realism increases the uncanny valley effect; increasing category uncertainty does not
• Does the uncanny valley exist? An empirical test of the relationship between eeriness and the human likeness of digitally created faces
• Uncanny valley [wikipedia]