2015/10/01 by Karl F. MacDorman, Debaleena Chattopadhyay · 2 citations
Neuroscience · #Aesthetic Perception and Analysis #Face Recognition and Perception #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2015.09.019
openalex publication_date 2015/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Human replicas may elicit unintended cold, eerie feelings in viewers, an effect known as the uncanny valley. Masahiro Mori, who proposed the effect in 1970, attributed it to inconsistencies in the replica's realism with some of its features perceived as human and others as nonhuman. This study aims to determine whether reducing realism consistency in visual features increases the uncanny valley effect. In three rounds of experiments, 548 participants categorized and rated humans, animals, and objects that varied from computer animated to real. Two sets of features were manipulated to reduce realism consistency. (For humans, the sets were eyes-eyelashes-mouth and skin-nose-eyebrows.) Reducing realism consistency caused humans and animals, but not objects, to appear eerier and colder. However, the predictions of a competing theory, proposed by Ernst Jentsch in 1906, were not supported: The most ambiguous representations-those eliciting the greatest category uncertainty-were neither the eeriest nor the coldest.
