The Uncanny Valley Manifests Even with Exposure to Robots

摘要

To investigate the reproducibility of the uncanny valley and its robustness to exposure to robotic technologies, we carried out a direct reproduction of Strait et al. (2015, 2017) and conceptual reproduction of Zł otowski et al. (2017). Consistent with prior findings, we observed an uncanny valley in participants' responses to agents ranging in appearance from mechanomorphic to highly humanlike to human. Specifically, participants exhibited particular aversion to and avoidance of highly humanlike robots relative to their less humanlike counterparts and humans. However, prior exposure via a 1-hour interaction with the NAO robot ($N=52$) was not found to significantly affect participants' responding relative to that of participants without any exposure to robotic technologies ($N=34$). The present work thus provides further indication that the uncanny valley reliably manifests, both with and without exposure.