(July 14, 2011) Ever get the heebie-jeebies at a wax museum?
Feel uneasy with an anthropomorphic robot? What about playing a video game or
watching an animated movie, where the human characters are pretty realistic but
just not quite right and maybe a bit creepy? If yes, then you’ve probably been
a visitor to what’s called the “uncanny valley.”
The phenomenon has been described
anecdotally for years, but how and why this happens is still a subject of
debate in robotics, computer graphics and neuroscience. Now an international
team of researchers, led by Ayse Pinar Saygin of the University of California,
San Diego, has taken a peek inside the brains of people viewing videos of an
uncanny android (compared to videos of a human and a robot-looking robot).
Published in the Oxford
University Press journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, the
functional MRI study suggests that what may be going on is due to a perceptual
mismatch between appearance and motion.