Spelunking in the Uncanny Valley

thanks to curiosity stream for supporting this episode go to curiosity stream comm slash psych to learn more you've probably heard of the uncanny valley before it's the sense of unease you feel when you encounter a slightly too lifelike robot or the feeling of the Ickes you get when you stumble across like a very creepy doll it's the sense of nope no thank you do not want that you might get if you say very hypothetically keep seeing unsettling cgi cat humans cavorting around your social media feeds the uncanny valley is the steep dropoff and how likable we find a character or robot to be when it gets slightly too close to appearing human these days it's everywhere in pop culture so it might surprise you to know that there's still a lot we don't understand about what causes it and whether it even really exists the idea of the uncanny valley was first proposed in an essay written by a Japanese roboticist named Masahiro mori in 1970 he hypothesized that a person's affinity for a robot would increase as the robot became more and more human-like and then very abruptly that affinity would drop off and be replaced by revulsion he provided examples by plotting human likeness against likability for things like robots and puppets and came up with a graph with a sharp dip that is the uncanny valley this idea wasn't totally new fifty years earlier Freud had written about the uncanny and the terror caused by things that reminded us of the familiar but the obsession with the uncanny valley in pop culture didn't really take off until the early 2000s in particular it's been attributed to go ahead and guess yes the 2004 Polar Express film starring Tom Hanks plenty of early CGI movies flopped in large part because they freaked people out and scientists really do site that freakiness as part of the history of the uncanny valley then in 2005 Morrie's essay was translated into english and psychologists started to actually study the phenomenon in earnest most of the research since then has looked at whether or not it's possible to recreate his uncanny valley shaped plot with real data and results have been mixed an early study of 45 people in 2006 asked participants to rate the likeability of a series of morphed images ranging from a mechanical robot through an Android to a human and they did see an uncanny valley type effect but even then the researchers questioned whether a spectrum of morphed images would always produce an uncanny valley basically was the uncanny valley inevitable it might not be because the effect doesn't always show up in general studies that use artificially manipulated images morphing between one thing and another have been more likely to support the valleys existence than those using images of real robots at least one study published in 2016 where 342 participants looked at 80 real-life robot faces did find an uncanny valley curve so it's kind of hard to say many of us feel something deep down when we see CGI Taylor Swift but the research simply hasn't pinned it down yet neither is there a clear idea of what might cause it there are tons of hypotheses some of the less likely ones invoke our perceptions like the pathogen avoidance hypothesis which suggests that disgust towards uncanny faces might have helped us avoid someone who might be carrying a transmissible disease or the mortality salience hypothesis which suggests that uncanny faces like clowns dolls wax figures corpses and zombies might literally remind us of death but none of these ideas really have enough evidence to support them other hypotheses invoke what's going on in our brains rather than what we perceive the violation of expectation hypothesis suggests that uncanny faces might lead us to think they're going to behave in a way that is human-like and then they violate that expectation the strongest evidence for this comes from research showing that robots and characters with a mismatch between their appearance and movements or their appearance and voice freak us out more than ones that just look creepy but researchers still believe this one doesn't answer all the questions the categorical uncertainty hypothesis also tries to make sense of how our brains are processing uncanny faces is what argues that there's uncertainty at category boundary so it's not just humans versus robots that freaks us out it's anything that our brains can't put into a nice neat box like a cat person but there's a problem a lot of this research relies on morphed images but it's possible that the very process of morphing images creates visual artifacts our brains simply do not like that might confound a lot of these findings and then there are the theories that look at what we think it means to be human the mind perception hypothesis suggests that we find robots uncanny when we think these non-human things might be capable of the human ability to think plan and feel 1 2012 study surveyed 165 participants and found that if they believed that a robot could sense and experience things that played a role in making a human-like robot seem creepier than a mechanical one the study also found that a non humanoid robot could be made creepy if participants were told that it was capable of human-like thinking feeling and planning the dehumanization hypothesis looks at the same idea from a different angle robots aren't creepy because they look and act more like humans rather it's because they look like us but don't act enough like us our brains are super good at recognizing faces the idea here is that when we see one and it doesn't behave the way we expect actual human people to act that triggers uncanny feelings there are arguments to be made and at least some evidence in favor of basically all of these hypotheses so we don't have a lot of answers when it comes to the uncanny valley it's a phenomenon many of us are pretty darn convinced is real we feel it in our guts even if psychologists can't really tell us why when Mori wrote his essay in 1970 he was interested in figuring out how roboticists and animators could overcome it and that's clearly something we're still struggling with some researchers though argue that we may never overcome it and in fact that it's worth keeping around it lets us know that we can tell the difference between robots and humans and that's actually a pretty cool thing for our brains to be able to do and it might come in handy in the future our perceptions that definitely filter the way we see the world and not just Androids the curiosity stream original what is reality is about that idea looking at how our brains construct the world around us and that's just one of the over 2,400 documentaries and nonfiction titles available on curiosity stream including exclusive originals so there's something for anyone who enjoys learning and you're here so you probably do curiosity stream is available worldwide and their titles cover topics ranging from science to lifestyle and nature to tech right now scishow viewers can get unlimited access starting at $2.99 a month and the first 31 days are completely free if you sign up at curiosity stream comm slash psych and use the promo code psych during the signup process so thanks for checking them out and for supporting scishow [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 104,881

Rating: 4.9600754 out of 5

Keywords: SciShow, science, Hank, Green, education, learn, brain, psychology, uncanny valley, Spelunking in the Uncanny Valley, CGI, android, robot, Masahiro Mori, pathogen avoidance hypothesis, mortality salience hypothesis, violation of expectation hypothesis, categorical uncertainty hypothesis, mind perception hypothesis, dehumanization hypothesis

Id: VmgS2JltwX4

Length: 7min 36sec (456 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/_Punko_]

Hmmm. When we look at EVE in Ex Machina and although she is clearly an android (transparent body parts) - we do not feel the uncanny valley effect from her.

The characters in the final fantasy movie apparently caused the uncanny valley effect, although I didn't get that vibe from it. Ventriloquist dummies - expecially the original wooden ones - I find broadcast negative vibes because their movements do NOT match their voice

I do believe it exists - but I think it is related to the expectations of performance - EVE looks like an android, but her movements, voice, and facial expressions are purely human - so we discount the fact that we can see her computer brain and through her abdomen.

[u/Mr_Teaofthetime]

Interesting video, although I've felt the effect I'd never heard of the term "uncanny valley".