title: The Uncanny Valley Does Not Interfere with Level 1 Visual Perspective Taking.
abstract: 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 (congruentcondition) than when they were different (incongruentcondition), 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.
authors.affiliation: Indiana University School of Informatics, 535 West Michigan Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202 USA.
authors.forename: Karl F
authors.initials: KF
authors.lastname: MacDorman
authors.affiliation: Indiana University School of Informatics, 535 West Michigan Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202 USA.
authors.forename: Preethi
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Srinivas
authors.affiliation: Indiana University School of Informatics, 535 West Michigan Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202 USA.
authors.forename: Himalaya
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Patel
keywords: anthropomorphism; character animation; cognitive empathy; mirror neuron system; theory of mind