OII Blog

Somewhere between totally unrealistic fake humans (eg C3PO) and totally realistic ones it seems that we suddenly get creeped out. Basically, we don’t like synthetic people that almost (but don’t quite) match human expressiveness.

This ‘uncanny valley‘ may explain why some films (Beowulf, The Polar Express) have attracted criticism (as being soul-less / dead eyed / eerie / creepy etc).

Why bring this up? WELL! according to a recent paper in PNAS it seems that monkey visual behavior falls into the uncanny valley too.

We presented monkeys with unrealistic and realistic synthetic monkey faces, as well as real monkey faces, and measured whether they preferred looking at one type versus the others (using looking time as a measure of preference). To our surprise, monkey visual behavior fell into the uncanny valley: They looked longer at real faces and unrealistic synthetic faces than at realistic synthetic faces.

The paper has been covered by BBC News (early origins for uncanny valley) and WIRED (Monkeys Fall Into ‘Uncanny Valley,’ Just Like Humans).

Monkey avatars: they creep monkeys out (image: BBC News)

Want to spend time in the uncanny valley? Well, there are obviously loads of weirdly realistic (= creepy) Japanese robots on Google Videos.

And there is the famous Philip K. Dick robotic head (basically an expressive mustachioed head stuck onto a slouchy body in shirt and jeans: see Philip K. Dick robot on YouTube) that follows people’s movements with the cameras in its eyes and (at least in theory) seems to believe that it is Philip K. Dick.

There is also a very bizarre Einstein head on a robot that clumps about declaring ‘I am Albert Einstein. I am a physicist’ (head by David Hanson, Robotics designer)

But probably the most realistic robot I found on YouTube is called Jules (eg watch Jules ponder his sexuality, and Jules discuss his being switched off).

Why do these objects make us feel uneasy? There are lots of theories about the uncanny valley, but according to MacDorman and Ishiguro:

An uncanny robot elicits an innate fear of death and culturally-supported defenses for coping with death’s inevitability … [P]artially disassembled androids… play on subconscious fears of reduction, replacement, and annihilation.

It seems that monkeys get freaked by this too.