Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The Uncanny Valley: Effect of Realism on the Impression of Artificial Human Faces
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Too real for comfort? Uncanny responses to computer generated faces
Computers in Human Behavior
Shared neural circuits for mentalizing about the self and others
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
The saliency of anomalies in animated human characters
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP)
Computers in Human Behavior
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When a computer-animated human character looks eerily realistic, viewers report a loss of empathy; they have difficulty taking the character's perspective. To explain this perspective-taking impairment, known as the uncanny valley, a novel theory is proposed: The more human or less eerie a character looks, the more it interferes with level 1 visual perspective taking when the character's perspective differs from that of the human observer (e.g., because the character competitively activates shared circuits in the observer's brain). The proposed theory is evaluated in three experiments involving a dot-counting task in which participants either assumed or ignored the perspective of characters varying in their human photorealism and eeriness. Although response times and error rates were lower when the number of dots faced by the observer and character were the same (congruent condition) than when they were different (incongruent condition), no consistent pattern emerged between the human photorealism or eeriness of the characters and participants' response times and error rates. Thus, the proposed theory is unsupported for level 1 visual perspective taking. As the effects of the uncanny valley on empathy have not previously been investigated systematically, these results provide evidence to eliminate one possible explanation.