A Bayesian explanation of the ‘Uncanny Valley’ effect and related psychological phenomena

2012/11/16 by Roger K. Moore · 4 citations
Psychology · Neuroscience · Social Sciences · #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Face Recognition and Perception #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation

paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/srep00864

openalex publication_date 2012/11/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

There are a number of psychological phenomena in which dramatic emotional responses are evoked by seemingly innocuous perceptual stimuli. A well known example is the 'uncanny valley' effect whereby a near human-looking artifact can trigger feelings of eeriness and repulsion. Although such phenomena are reasonably well documented, there is no quantitative explanation for the findings and no mathematical model that is capable of predicting such behavior. Here I show (using a Bayesian model of categorical perception) that differential perceptual distortion arising from stimuli containing conflicting cues can give rise to a perceptual tension at category boundaries that could account for these phenomena. The model is not only the first quantitative explanation of the uncanny valley effect, but it may also provide a mathematical explanation for a range of social situations in which conflicting cues give rise to negative, fearful or even violent reactions.

Citations

• The Uncanny Valley: Effect of Realism on the Impression of Artificial Human Faces
• The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries.
• The thing that should not be: predictive coding and the uncanny valley in perceiving human and humanoid robot actions
• Human adults and human infants show a “perceptual magnet effect” for the prototypes of speech categories, monkeys do not
• Is The Uncanny Valley An Uncanny Cliff?

Cited by

• A review of empirical evidence on different uncanny valley hypotheses: support for perceptual mismatch as one road to the valley of eeriness
• Familiar faces rendered strange: Why inconsistent realism drives characters into the uncanny valley
• Reducing consistency in human realism increases the uncanny valley effect; increasing category uncertainty does not
• Uncanny valley [wikipedia]

Related

• A reappraisal of the uncanny valley: categorical perception or frequency-based sensitization?
• Stimulus-category competition, inhibition, and affective devaluation: a novel account of the uncanny valley
• A review of empirical evidence on different uncanny valley hypotheses: support for perceptual mismatch as one road to the valley of eeriness
• Reducing consistency in human realism increases the uncanny valley effect; increasing category uncertainty does not
• Familiar faces rendered strange: Why inconsistent realism drives characters into the uncanny valley