The Uncanny Valley Phenomenon: A replication with short presentation times

摘要

Research repeatedly observed that artificial characters and robots with a human appearance can create an impression of uncanniness in the observer, when reaching a certain level of human likeness. Hypotheses about the origins of this phenomenon called the “Uncanny Valley” are divergent. One group hypothesizes about a fast system, the other of a more conscious processing. The present study was set up to investigate how long participants need to form a stable judgment of uncanniness for robot faces, to see what happens to the lowest point of the valley when the exposure times differ, to look at the possibly involved processes of categorizing faces and to see whether the uncanny valley effect generalized across participants. Thirty-nine participants rated the eeriness of robot faces that varied in human-likeness. These ratings were done with presentation times of 50ms, 100ms, 200ms and 2s. In essence, this part of the study was a replication of a study by Mathur and Reichling (2016), using their stimuli set with extra stimuli added around the expected valley areas and with shorter presentation times. The results show that all participants individually have a characteristic uncanny valley curvature in the long condition and almost all participants have the curvature in the shorter conditions. This suggests generalizability of the uncanny valley. The lowest point of the valley, the trough, shifts towards lower human-likeness when the presentation times get shorter. This also suggests that the cognitive process of category confusion has something to do with the uncanny valley.