Misako Ida
Papers
1
Total Citations
42
H-Index
1
About
Misako Ida’s research sits at the fascinating intersection of developmental psychology and social robotics, exploring how infants perceive and respond to faces. Her most-cited work, “Infants prefer the faces of strangers or mothers to morphed faces: an uncanny valley between social novelty and familiarity” (2012, 42 citations), provides groundbreaking insight into the origins of the uncanny valley phenomenon. Ida demonstrated that even infants—as young as several months old—exhibit a negative response to highly realistic but imperfectly human faces, preferring either completely familiar (mother) or completely novel (stranger) faces over morphed ones. This finding suggests that the uncanny valley is not a learned cultural response but an innate perceptual mechanism, likely evolved to help infants navigate social novelty and familiarity. By bridging developmental science and human-robot interaction, Ida’s work has profound implications for designing child-friendly robots and avatars. Her research continues to shape how we understand the earliest roots of social evaluation and the boundaries of human-likeness.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1