Too real for comfort? Uncanny responses to computer generated faces

By Karl Frederic MacDorman, R. Green, Chin-Chang Ho, C. T. Koch. Computers in Human Behavior, 2009

536 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As virtual humans approach photorealistic perfection, they risk making real humans uncomfortable. This intriguing phenomenon, known as the uncanny valley, is well known but not well understood. In an effort to demystify the causes of the uncanny valley, this paper proposes several perceptual, cognitive, and social mechanisms that have already helped address riddles like empathy, mate selection, threat avoidance, cognitive dissonance, and psychological defenses. In the four studies described herein, a computer generated human character’s facial proportions, skin texture, and level of detail were varied to examine their effect on perceived eeriness, human likeness, and attractiveness. In Study I, texture photorealism and polygon count increased human likeness. In Study II, texture photorealism heightened the accuracy of human judgments of ideal facial proportions. In Study III, atypical facial proportions were shown to be more disturbing on photorealistic faces than on other faces. In Study IV, a mismatch in the size and texture of the eyes and face was especially prone to make a character eerie. These results contest the depiction of the uncanny valley as a simple relation between comfort level and human likeness. This paper concludes by introducing a set of design principles for bridging the uncanny valley.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e472904815fbd41453edfaa7aeb51f837987f6c7

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Citations in the corpus

What is XR? Towards a Framework for Augmented and Virtual Reality (2022, background): “This is particularly true when displaying representations of humans, as this evokes strangely familiar feelings or eeriness and revulsion, an effect that is commonly referred to as the uncanny valley (MacDorman et al., 2009; also suggested by our informants, e.g., BILL).”
Anthropomorphism: Opportunities and Challenges in Human–Robot Interaction (2014, background): “Furthermore, at least for computer graphics there are guidelines regarding the creation of anthropomorphic heads that can reduce the unnaturalness of agents’ faces [97].”
The thing that should not be: predictive coding and the uncanny valley in perceiving human and humanoid robot actions (2011, background): “A total of eight actions per actor were used in the fMRI experiment, including both transitive (drinking water from a cup, picking up a piece of paper from a table, grasping a tube of hand lotion, wiping a table with a cloth) and intransitive actions [waving hand, nodding affirmatively, shaking head”
Individual differences predict sensitivity to the uncanny valley (2015, methodology): “…cannot be inferred, because the formal properties were not varied systematically as independent variables (as in, e.g., Burleigh, Schoenherr, & Lacroix, 2013; Cheetham, Pavlovic, Jordan, Suter, & Jäncke, 2013; Cheetham, Suter, & Jäncke, 2011; Looser & Wheatley, 2010; MacDorman et al., 2009).”
Marketing robot services in hospitality and tourism: the role of anthropomorphism (2019, background): “For example, manipulating computer generated human facial proportions, skin texture, and facial detail suggested that complex factors and interactions vary the level of eeriness (MacDorman, Green, Ho, & Koch, 2009).”
Feeling robots and human zombies: mind perception and the uncanny valley. (2012, background): “Second, the uncan-ny valley seems to be driven by a number of factors (MacDorman, Green, Ho, & Koch, 2009), including general perceptions of categories (Ramey, 2005), speciﬁc facial features (Seyama & Nagayama, 2007), and threat avoidance (MacDorman et al., 2009).”
Revisiting the uncanny valley theory: Developing and validating an alternative to the Godspeed indices (2010, background): “…uncanny valley typically manipulate as an independent variable a character's ''objective " humanness—the human photorealism of the character's morphology, skin texture, motion quality, or other formal property (MacDorman, Coram, Ho, & Patel, 2010; MacDorman et al., 2009; Seyama & Nagayama, 2007).”
The Development of the Uncanny Valley in Infants (2011, methodology): “Adults find an uncanny looking face (i.e., with abnormally large eyes) more unpleasant to look at than a realistic face without abnormal features (MacDorman et al., 2009; Seyama & Nagayama, 2007).”
The Uncanny Valley: Existence and Explanations (2015, methodology): “…2005, p. 30; Piwek, McKay, & Pollick, 2014, p. 271; White, McKay, & Pollick, 2007, p. 477), eeriness (Mitchell et al., 2011, p. 10), comfort level (MacDorman et al., 2009, p. 695), “valence” (Cheetham, Suter, & Jäncke, 2011, p. 2), “empathetic emotional response” (Misselhorn, 2009, p. 346),…”