Marcus Cheetham
Papers
3
Total Citations
272
H-Index
3
About
Marcus Cheetham is a leading researcher in the cognitive neuroscience of the uncanny valley, a phenomenon that describes the eerie, unsettling feeling people experience when encountering highly realistic humanlike robots or avatars. His work systematically investigates the perceptual and neural mechanisms underlying this response, moving beyond simple affective descriptions to probe the cognitive processes at play. Cheetham’s key contributions include demonstrating that the uncanny feeling is linked to perceptual discrimination difficulty—the challenge of categorizing an ambiguous, near-human stimulus—rather than mere negative affect. Using functional MRI, he has shown that this difficulty engages distinct brain networks involved in conflict monitoring and categorization. His seminal 2011 paper (176 citations) provided some of the first neuroimaging evidence for the uncanny valley hypothesis, while his subsequent work (2014, 71 citations) reframed the phenomenon as a “Happy Valley” of perceptual ease. By rigorously addressing methodological issues in the field (2013), Cheetham has helped establish a more robust experimental framework for studying human-likeness perception. His research is essential reading for anyone interested in human-robot interaction, social cognition, and the neural basis of perceptual ambiguity.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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