Into the Uncanny Valley
November 16 2009
NEW FINDINGS SHED LIGHT ON A CENTURY’S WORTH OF BIZARRE EXPLANATIONS FOR THE EERIE FEELING WE GET AROUND LIFELIKE ROBOTS.
A dead body appears in almost every way to be a normal human. But the pallid skin and empty eyes signal that the person-shaped form we are looking at is, in a way we can’t even fully grasp, strange and disturbing.
We feel a similar eeriness when interacting with robots and models that look almost human but fall short of convincing us because of subtle peculiarities in their features. Poor box office returns on computer-animated films like “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf” were blamed on moviegoers finding the not quite true-to-life characters unsettling.
Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the particular occurrences of the uncanny, in which humans are bothered by interaction with human-like models, began as a psychological curiosity. But as our ability to design artificial life has increased—along with our dependence on it—getting to the heart of why people respond negatively to realistic models of themselves has taken on a new importance. Attempts to understand the origins of this reaction, known since the 1970s as the “uncanny valley response,” have drawn on everything from repressed fears of castration to an evolutionary mechanism for mate selection, but there has been little empirical evidence to assess the validity of these ideas.
New findings published in PNAS this September are putting some long-overdue experimental rigor behind the uncanny valley. Last spring at Princeton’s Neuroscience Institute, Asif Ghazanfar developed a computer model of a macaque monkey designed to interact with real macaques. But the monkeys weren’t fooled. Further testing revealed that, much to Ghazanfar’s surprise, his model was eliciting an uncanny valley response from the monkeys. It was the first time scientists had ever observed such a response in a non-human species.
“By showing that monkeys can do it, several things become plausible,” Ghazanfar says. “One is that there is an evolutionary explanation for the uncanny valley and the other is that it is not something specific to our human, cultural experience.” These findings may for the first time allow scientists to go back through a century’s worth of peculiar ideas about the origins of the uncanny valley and begin putting them to the test.
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