Perceptual discrimination difficulty and familiarity in the Uncanny Valley: More like a 'Happy Valley'

Frontiers in Psychology

Volumn 5, Issue OCT, 2014, Pages

  Cheetham, Marcus ^a   Suter, Pascal ^a   Jancke, Lutz ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH   (Switzerland)

Author keywords

Categorization; Human likeness; Mere exposure; Other race effect; Perceptual discrimination; Processing fluency; Uncanny valley

Indexed keywords

EID: 84907706992     PISSN: None     EISSN: 16641078     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01219     Document Type: Article

References (90)

1. Annett, M. A classification of hand preference by association analysis. (1970). Br J Psychol., 61(3):303-21
2. Bartlett, J. C., & Searcy, J. (1993). Inversion and configuration of faces. Cognitive Psychology, 25, 281-316.Brehaut, J. C., & Tipper, S. P. (1996).
3. Beale J.M., & Keil F.C. (1995). Categorical effects in the perception of faces. Cognition, 57, 217-219.
4. Best, C.T., Morrongiello, B., & Robson, R. (1981). Perceptual equivalence of acoustic cues in speech and nonspeech perception. Perc. & Psychophys., 29, 191-211.
5. Bruyer. R., Leclere, S., & Quinet, P. (2004). Ethnic categorisation of faces is not independent of face identity. Perception, 33(2): 169-179. doi: 10.1068/p5094.
6. Bülthoff, I., & Newell, F.N. (2000): Investigating categorical perception of gender with 3-D morphs of familiar faces. Perception, 29, 57
7. Burleigh, T. J., Schoenherr, J. R., & Lacroix, G. L. (2013). Does the uncanny valley exist? An empirical test of the relationship between eeriness and the human likeness of digitally created faces. Computers in Human Behavior. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.11.021.
8. Campbell, R., Pascalis, O., Coleman, M., Wallace, S.B., & Benson, P.J. (1997). Are faces of different species perceived categorically by human observers? Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B: Biol. Sci., 264, 1429-1434.
9. Cheetham, M., & Jancke, L. (2013). Perceptual and category processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' dimension of human likeness: some methodological issues. J. Vis. Exp. (76), e4375, doi:10.3791/4375
10. Cheetham, M., Suter, P., & Jancke, L. (2011).The human likeness dimension of the "uncanny valley hypothesis": behavioral and functional MRI findings. Front Hum Neurosci., 5, 126.
11. Cheetham. M., Pavlovic. I., Jordan. N., Suter. P., & Jancke, L. (2013). Category Processing and the human likeness dimension of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis: Eye-Tracking Data. Front Psychol., 4, 108. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00108.
12. Corneille, O., & Judd, C. M. (1999). Accentuation and sensitization effects in the categorization of multi-faceted stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 927-941.
13. Corneille, O., Goldstone, R.L., Queller, S., & Potter, T. (2006). Asymmetries in categorization, perceptual discrimination, and visual search for reference and nonreference exemplars. Mem Cognit., 34(3), 556-567.
14. Diamond, R., & Carey, S. (1977). Development changes in the representation of faces. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 23, 1-22.
15. Diamond, R., & Carey, S. (1986). Why faces are and are not special: an effect of expertise. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 115(2), 107-117.
16. Ectoff, N.L., & Magee, J.J. (1992). Categorical perception of facial expressions. Cognition, 44, 227-240.
17. Fabri, M., Moore, D.J., & Hobbs, D.J (2004) Mediating the Expression of Emotion in Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments: An Experimental Study. International Journal of Virtual Reality, Springer Verlag, London
18. Fallshore, M., & Schooler, J. W. (1995). The verbal vulnerability ofperceptual expertise. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,Memory, & Cognition, 21, 1608-1623.
19. Francis, A.L., & Ciocca, V. (2003). Stimulus presentation order and the perception of lexical tones in Cantonese. JASA., 114, 1611-1621.
20. Gelder, B. de, Teunisse, J., P., & Benson, P., J. (1997). Categorical perception of facial expressions: Categories and their internal structure. Cognition and Emotion, 11(1) 1 - 23.
21. Gibson, E. J. (1991). An odyssey in learning and perception. MIT Press: Cambridge.
22. Goldstone, R. (1994). Influences of categorization of perceptual discrimination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 123, 178-200.
23. Goldstone, R. L. (1998). Perceptual learning. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 585-612.
24. Goldstone, R. L., Lippa, Y., and Shiffrin, R. M. (2001). Altering object representations through category learning. Cognition, 78(1), 27-43.
25. Gosselin, F., Archambault, A., and Schyns, P.G (2001) Interactions between taxonomic knowledge, categorization, and perception. In: Hahn, U. and Rascar, M. (eds.) Similarity and Categorization. Oxford University Press.
26. Hall, G. (1991). Perceptual and associative learning. Clarendon Press: Oxford.
27. Hanley, J.R. & Roberson, D. (2011) Categorical perception effects reflect differences in typicality on withincategory trials. Psychon Bull Rev., 18(2), 355-63. doi: 10.3758/s13423-010-0043-z.
28. Hanson, D. (2006) "Exploring the aesthetic range for humanoid robots", in Proceedings of the ICCS/CogSci-2006 Long Symposium: Toward Social Mechanisms of Android Science, pp. 39-42.
29. Harnad, S. (1987). Categorical perception. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
30. Hautus, M. J. and X. Meng (2001). Decision strategies in the ABX (matching-to-sample) psychophysical task. Perception & Psychophysics, 64, 89-106.
31. Ho, C.-C., and MacDorman, K. (2010). Revisiting the uncanny valley theory: developing and validating an alternative to the Godspeed indices. Comput. Hum. Behav. 26, 1508-1518.
32. Johansen MK, Palmeri TJ. (2002). Are there representational shifts during category learning? Cogn Psychol., 45(4), 482-553.
33. Kikutani, M., Roberson, D., & Hanley, J. R. (2008). What's in the name?Categorical perception of unfamiliar faces can occur through labeling. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 787-794.
34. Leder, H. and Bruce, V. (2000). When inverted faces are recognized: The role of configural information in face recognition. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A-Human Experimental Psychology, 53, 513-536.
35. Leder, H. and Carbon, C. C. (2006). Face-specific configural processing of relational information. British Journal of Psychology, 97, 19-29.
36. Levin, D. T. (1996). Classifying faces by race: The structure of face categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 22, 1364-1382.
37. Levin, D. T. (2000). Race as a visual feature: Using visual search and perceptual discrimination tasks to understand face categories and the cross race recognition deficit. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 559-574.
38. Levin, D. T., & Beale, J. M. (2000). Categorical perception occurs in newly learned faces, other-race faces, and inverted faces. Perception & Psychophysics, 62, 386-401.
39. Liberman, A. M., Harris, K. S., Hoffman, H. S., & Griffith, B. C. (1957). The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54, 358-368.
40. Livingston, K. R., Andrews, J. K., & Harnad, S. (1998). Categorical perception eVects induced by category learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 24(3), 732-753.
41. Looser, C.E., & Wheatley, T. (2010).The tipping point of animacy: How, when, and where we perceive life in a face. Psychological Science, 21,1854-1862
42. MacDorman, K. (2005). "Androids as an Experimental Apparatus: Why is There an Uncanny Valley and Can We Exploit it?" in Toward Social Mechanisms of Android Science: A CogSci 2005 Workshop, Stresa, 106-118
43. MacDorman, K. F. & Ishiguro, H. (2006). The uncanny advantage of using androids in cognitive science research. Interaction Studies, 7(3), 297-337.
44. MacDorman, K., Green, R., Ho, C.-C., & Koch, C. (2009). Too real for comfort? Uncanny responses to computer generated faces. Computers in Human Behavior, 25(3), 695-710
45. Macmillan, N. A., & Creelman, C. D. (2005). Detection Theory: A User's Guide. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
46. Marsolek, C. (2004). Abstractionist versus exemplar-based theories of visual word priming: A subsystems resolution. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 57A, 1233-1259.
47. Massaro, D.W. and Cohen, M.M. (1983). Categorical or continuous speech perception: A new test. Speech Communication, 2, 15-35.
48. Matsuda, Y.T., Okamoto, Y., Ida, M., Okanoya, K., & Myowa-Yamakoshi, M. (2012). Infants prefer the faces of strangers or mothers to morphed faces: an uncanny valley between social novelty and familiarity. Biol Lett., 8(5), 725-8. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0346.
49. Maurer, D., Le Grand, R., & Mondloch, C.J .(2002) The Many Faces of Configural Processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6: 255-260. doi:10.1016/s1364-6613(02)01903-4.
50. McGugin, R.W., Tanaka, J.W., Lebrecht, S., Tarr, M.J., & Gauthier, I. (2011). Race-specific perceptual discrimination improvement following short individuation training with faces. Cogn Sci., 35(2), 330-347. doi: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01148.x.
51. Minato, T., Shimada, M., Itakura, S., Lee, K., & Ishiguro, H. (2006). Evaluating human likeness of an android by comparing gaze behaviors elicited. Advanced Robotics, 20, 1147-1163.
52. Moore, R.K. (2012). A Bayesian explanation of the 'Uncanny Valley' effect and related psychological phenomena. Scientific Reports 2, 864. doi:10.1038/srep00864
53. Mori, M. 1970. Bukimi no tani [The uncanny valley]. Energy, 7(4) 33-35. (Translated by Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato in 2005 within Appendix B for the paper Androids as an Experimental Apparatus: Why is there an uncanny and can we exploit it? In Proceedings of the CogSci-2005 Workshop: Toward Social Mechanisms of Android Science (Italy, July 2005), 106-118).
54. Murray, J. E., Yong, E., & Rhodes, G. (2000). Revisiting the perception of upside-down faces. Psychological Science, 11(6), 498-502.
55. Myles-Worsley, M., Johnston, W.A., & Simons, M.A. (1988). The influence of expertise on X-ray image processing. J. Exp. Psychol.: Learn. Mem. Cogn., 14, 553-557
56. Newell, F.,N., & Bulthoff, H.H. (2002). Cognition Categorical perception of familiar objects. Cognition, 85, 113-143.
57. Notman, L.A., Sowden, P.T., & Ozgen, E. (2005).The nature of learned categorical perception effects: a psychophysical approach. Cognition. 95(2), 1-14.
58. Pierce, J. R., & Gilbert,E. N. (1958). On AX and ABX limens. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 30, 593-595.
59. Pilling, M., Wiggett, A., Özgen, E., & Davies, I. R. L. (2003). Is color "categorical perception" really perceptual? Memory & Cognition, 31, 538-551.
60. Pisoni, D. B., (1973). Auditory and phonetic memory codes in the discrimination of consonants and vowels. Perception & Psychophysics, 13, 253-260.
61. Pollick, F. E. (2006). In search of the uncanny valley. In K. Grammer, & A. Juett (Eds.), Analog communication: Evolution, brain mechanisms, dynamics, simulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, The Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology.
62. Prins, N., & Kingdom, F. A. A. (2009). Palamedes: Matlab routines for analyzing psychophysical data. http://www.palamedestoolbox.org
63. Ramey, C. H. (2005). The uncanny valley of similarities concerning abortion, baldness, heaps of sand, and humanlike robots. Paper Presented at the Proceedings of Views of the Uncanny Valley Workshop: IEEERAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Tsukuba.
64. Reis, H. T., & Gable, S. L. (2003). Toward a positive psychology of relationships. In C. L. Keyes & J. Haidt (Eds.), Flourishing: The positive person and the good life (pp. 129-159). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association
65. Repp, B. H. (1984). Categorical perception: Issues, methods and findings. In N. Lass (Ed.), Speech and language, vol. 10: Advances in basic research and practice (pp. 244-335). Orlando, FL: Academic Press
66. Rhodes, G. (1988). Looking at faces: First-order and second-order features as determinants of facial appearance. Perception, 17(1), 43-63.
67. Rhodes, G., Brake, S., & Atkinson, A. P. (1993). What's lost in inverted faces? Cognition, 47(1), 25-57
68. Rhodes, G., Tan, S., Brake, S., & Taylor, K. (1989). Expertise and configural coding in face recognition. British Journal of Psychology, 80, 313-331.
69. Roberson, D., & Davidoff, J. (2000). The categorical perception of colors and facial expressions: The effect of verbal interference. Memory & Cognition, 28, 977-986.
70. Rossion, B. (2009). Distinguishing the cause and the consequence of face inversion: The perceptual field hypothesis. Acta Psychologica, 132, 300-312.
71. Schyns, P. G. & Murphy, G. L. (1994). The ontogeny of part representation in object concepts. In Medin (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 31, 301-349.
72. Schyns, P. G. (1991). A modular neural network of concept acquisition. Cognitive Science, 15, 461-508
73. Schyns, P.G., & Oliva, A. (1994). From blobs to boundary edges: evidence for time and spatial scale depen dent scene recognition. Psychol. Sci. 5, 195-200.
74. Schyns,P.G.,& Gosselin,F. (2003). "Diagnostic use of scale information fo rcomponential and holistic recognition," in Perception of Faces, Objects, and Scenes. Analytic and Holistic Processes, eds M. A.Peterson and G.Rhodes (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 120-145.
75. Sergent,J. (1986)."Microgenesis of face perception,"in Aspects of Face Processing, eds H.D.Ellis, M.A.Jeeves, F.Newcombe, and A.M.Young (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff), 17-33.
76. Sigala, R., Logothetis, N.K., & Rainer, G. (2011). Own-species bias in the representations of monkey and human face categories in the primate temporal lobe. Journal of Neurophysiology, 105(6), 2740-2752.
77. Stevenage, S. V. (1998). Which twin are you? A demonstration of induced categorical perception of identical twin faces. British Journal of Psychology, 89, 39-57.
78. Studdert-Kennedy, M., Liberman, A.M., Harris, K.S., & Cooper, F.S. (1970). Motor theory of speech perception: A reply to Lane's critical review. Psychological Review, 77(3), 234-249.
79. Tanaka, J. W., & Curran, T. (2001). A neural basis for expert object recognition. Psychological Science, 12, 43-47.
80. Tinwell A, Grimshaw, M, & Williams A, (2010). Uncanny behaviour in survival horror games. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 2(1), 3-25.
81. Tinwell, A. 2009. The Uncanny as Usability Obstacle. In Proceedings of the "Online Communities and Social Computing" workshop, HCI International 2009. Springer, Volume 12, San Diego, CA.
82. Tinwell, A., & Grimshaw, M. (2009). Bridging the uncanny: an impossible traverse? In O. Sotamaa, & A. Lugmayr, H. Franssila, P. Näränen, & J. Vanhala (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th International MindTrek Conference: Everyday Life in the Ubiquitous Era (pp. 66-73). Tampere, Finland: ACM.
83. Treisman, A, & Gormican S. (1988). Feature analysis in early vision: evidence from search asymmetries. Psychol Rev. 95(1), 15-48.
84. Valentine, T., & Endo, M. (1992). Towards an exemplar model of face processing: The effects of race and distinctiveness. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 44A, 671-703.
85. Van Selst, M. & Jolicoeur, P. (1994). A solution to the effect of sample size on outlier elimination. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47A, 631-650.
86. Viviani, P., Binda P., & Borsato T. (2007). Categorical perception of newly learned faces. Visual Cognition, 15, 420-467
87. Walters, M. L., Syrdal, D. S., Dautenhaun, K., Boekhorst, R., & Koay, K. L. (2008). Avoiding the uncanny valley: robot appearance, personality and consistency of behavior in an attention-seeking home scenario for a robot companion. Auton. Robots., 24, 159-178.
88. Winkielman P, Schwarz N, Fazendeiro T, Reber R (2003) The hedonic marking of processing fluency: Implications for evaluative judgment. In: Klauer JMKC, editor. The psychology of evaluation: Affective processes in cognition and emotion. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 189-217.
89. Yamada, Y., Kawabe, T., & Ihaya, K. (2013). Categorization difficulty is associated with negative evaluation in the "uncanny valley" phenomenon. Japanese Psychological Research, 55 (1), 20-32 doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5884.2012.00538.x.
90. Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Monographs, 9 (2, Pt. 2), 1-27