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Taking a step back to see more clearly : exploring the full extent of the Uncanny Valley using biological faces

Bischoff, Milan (2021) Taking a step back to see more clearly : exploring the full extent of the Uncanny Valley using biological faces.

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Abstract:Despite two decades of research, the causes of the Uncanny Valley remain a mystery. To shed some light on the possible conceptualizations of human-likeness and in regard to the prominence of evolutionary explanations to the Uncanny Valley effect we exploratively tried to replicate the effect outside of its original domain of engineering. Consequently, we distanced ourselves from the usual experimental setup using artificial faces of robots or computer-generated characters and instead created a stimulus set with only unmanipulated biological faces of human and non-human primates. Using multilevel modelling we were able to observe the effect almost universally throughout all participants. These results allow us to generalize the Uncanny Valley effect as a broader phenomenon independent of artificial or synthetic characters. This strongly favours the evolutionary approach stating that the Uncanny Valley is a particular manifestation of a mechanism that originally developed to increase our reproductive fitness over the course of evolution. Keywords: Uncanny Valley, primates, evolutionary perspective, visual perception, phylogenetics
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:77 psychology
Programme:Psychology BSc (56604)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/87562
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