Monkey visual behavior falls into the uncanny valley

Very realistic human-looking robots or computer avatars tend to elicit negative feelings in human observers. This phenomenon is known as the "uncanny valley" response. It is hypothesized that this uncanny feeling is because the realistic synthetic characters elicit the concept of "hum...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2009-10, Vol.106 (43), p.18362-18366
Main Authors: Steckenfinger, Shawn A, Ghazanfar, Asif A
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal cognition
Animals
Behavior, Animal
Behavioral neuroscience
Biological Evolution
Biological Sciences
Emotions
Face
Facial expressions
Humans
Imaging, Three-Dimensional
Luminance
Macaca fascicularis - psychology
Male
Monkeys
Monkeys & apes
Philosophical realism
Physical Sciences
Polygons
Primates
Robots
Social interaction
Visual Perception
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Summary:Very realistic human-looking robots or computer avatars tend to elicit negative feelings in human observers. This phenomenon is known as the "uncanny valley" response. It is hypothesized that this uncanny feeling is because the realistic synthetic characters elicit the concept of "human," but fail to live up to it. That is, this failure generates feelings of unease due to character traits falling outside the expected spectrum of everyday social experience. These unsettling emotions are thought to have an evolutionary origin, but tests of this hypothesis have not been forthcoming. To bridge this gap, we presented monkeys with unrealistic and realistic synthetic monkey faces, as well as real monkey faces, and measured whether they preferred looking at one type versus the others (using looking time as a measure of preference). To our surprise, monkey visual behavior fell into the uncanny valley: They looked longer at real faces and unrealistic synthetic faces than at realistic synthetic faces.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.0910063106