I’m not sure how this maps on to my favorite uncanny valley study of all time…
Monkeys are freaked out by almost-but-not-quite-real depictions of themselves. That tendency is well documented in humans, but has never before been seen in another species. To test their preference, researchers showed macaque monkeys real pictures, digital caricatures and realistic reconstructions of other monkey faces. To the latter, the macaques repeatedly averted their eyes. “The visual behavior of the monkeys falls into the uncanny valley just the same as human visual behavior,” wrote Princeton University evolutionary biologists Shawn Steckinfinger and Asif Ghazanfar in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
… but it’s still a interesting result that has to be dealt with:
The team made videos of Repliee Q2 performing actions… the same actions were performed by the Japanese woman whom Q2 is based on. Finally, the researchers stripped the robot of its synthetic skin and hair to reveal a Terminator-style metal robot with dangling wires and visible circuits… When viewing the real human and the metallic robot, the brains showed very typical reactions. But when presented with the uncanny android, the brain “lit up” like a Christmas tree.… “The brain doesn’t seem tuned to care about either biological appearance or biological motion per se,” said Saygin, assistant professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego. “What it seems to be doing is looking for its expectations to be met — for appearance and motion to be congruent.”
The folk evolutionary explanation for the uncanny valley is that early primates who had an instinctual aversion to diseased corpses would have been selected over those that didn’t. There are also more complicated versions of the pathogen avoidance theory, e.g. particularly bad disfigurement is also a sign of disease. But it’s not clear, if that’s how the instinct developed, why the valley should deepen so much for moving rather than still images.
In terms of rhetorical theory – and if you were really determined – you could probably do some theoretical handwaving about how expectation is hardwired into the brain, which would give a neurological glaze to Burkean descriptions about the psychology of form. There is an explanation for the uncanny valley that has to do with the selection of models, where the discomfort is generated because the brain selects the “wrong” model for evaluating robotic movement. So it’s not totally impossible.
But you’d still have to deal with those studies showing monkeys experience the uncanny valley, which don’t line up cleanly with higher-order psychological explanations.
Photo:
* Smurrayinchester [Wiki Commons]
References:
* Monkeys Fall Into ‘Uncanny Valley,’ Just Like Humans [Wired]
* Why Brains Get Creeped Out by Androids [Wired]
* MacDorman, K and Ishiguro, H. The uncanny advantage of using androids in cognitive and social science research. Interaction Studies, 2006. 7: p. 297-337.
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* Cognitive Science
* Biology and Evolution
* Physics and Astronomy
