Categorization-based stranger avoidance does not explain the uncanny valley effect

dc.contributor.authorMacDorman, Karl F.
dc.contributor.authorChattopadhyay, Debaleena
dc.contributor.departmentBioHealth Informatics, School of Informatics and Computingen_US
dc.date.accessioned2018-11-16T19:49:00Z
dc.date.available2018-11-16T19:49:00Z
dc.date.issued2017-04
dc.description.abstractThe uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human risks eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers. Categorization-based stranger avoidance theory identifies the cause of this feeling as categorizing the entity into a novel category. This explanation is doubtful because stranger is not a novel category in adults; infants do not avoid strangers while the category stranger remains novel; infants old enough to fear strangers prefer photographs of strangers to those more closely resembling a familiar person; and the uncanny valley’s characteristic eeriness is seldom felt when meeting strangers. We repeated our original experiment with a more realistic 3D computer model and found no support for categorization-based stranger avoidance theory. By contrast, realism inconsistency theory explains cold, eerie feelings elicited by transitions between instances of two different, mutually exclusive categories, given that at least one category is anthropomorphic: Cold, eerie feelings are caused by prediction error from perceiving some features as features of the first category and other features as features of the second category. In principle, realism inconsistency theory can explain not only negative evaluations of transitions between real and computer modeled humans but also between different vertebrate species.en_US
dc.eprint.versionAuthor's manuscripten_US
dc.identifier.citationMacDorman, K. F., & Chattopadhyay, D. (2017). Categorization-based stranger avoidance does not explain the uncanny valley effect. Cognition, 161, 132–135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.01.009en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1805/17777
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.publisherElsevieren_US
dc.relation.isversionof10.1016/j.cognition.2017.01.009en_US
dc.relation.journalCognitionen_US
dc.rightsPublisher Policyen_US
dc.sourceAuthoren_US
dc.subjectanthropomorphismen_US
dc.subjectcomputer animationen_US
dc.subjectface perceptionen_US
dc.titleCategorization-based stranger avoidance does not explain the uncanny valley effecten_US
dc.typeArticleen_US
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