As robots become an ever-increasing component in our lives, their importance depends greatly on how they can socially interact with people. Likeability with the general population has now become a crucial design factor in the manufacturing of android robots. Reports of negative reactions involving humans and robots has led to the supposed existence of an ‘Uncanny Valley,’ a range in human perception where “imperfect human-likeness provokes dislike” (Mathur & Reichling, 2015). Past studies involving the ‘Uncanny Valley’ often use images of humans and robots that have been morphed together, enhanced by unnatural warping, to see if the effects of the Uncanny Valley can be replicated.
In a study done by Maya B. Mathur and David B. Reichling, the …show more content…
Participants were selected using Amazon Mechanical Turk, which pays participants for completing online surveys. The faces were randomized and subjects were told to fill out a questionnaire, rating each face on how mechanical/human it was and if positive or negative emotion was displayed. A near perfect correlation between mechanical/human resemblance allowed researchers to conclude that the faces used for testing did represent an accurate spectrum of android robots. Ratings of emotion were uncorrelated with mechanical/human resemblance, suggesting that the facial expressions of the androids would not distort the data in subsequent parts of the experiment. Furthermore, 15 of the 80 faces were randomly selected and rated in a randomized order by subjects to measure the likability of each face from creepy to most-friendly/pleasing. The results of these ratings showed that likeability rose to a certain point but declined as intermediate human-likeness increased. Likeability increased again when the robots were almost fully human-like, a trend that is characteristic of the Uncanny Valley (Mathur & Reichling, 2015). The final part of the experiment involved testing subjects’ perception of trust …show more content…
The implementation of the game-theory simulation also allowed for experimenters to see how deep the effects of the Uncanny Valley could penetrate social behavior between human and robots. ‘Uncanny Valley’ was shown by experimenters to be more than just a superficial condition, as it also affected cognitive behavior that is central to how we judge others. This experiment is a prime example of Cognitive Science in action since analyzing the human psychology behind the Uncanny Valley could shape how robotic engineers design androids in the future, taking into account that people are more receptive to robots that are either mechanical or fully human and unreceptive to an intermediate of the two. This study also opens up opportunities for further research into ‘theory of mind’ since subjects in the investment game could be presumed as having attributed various degrees of mental states to the spectrum of robots, which included thoughts and
In a study done by Maya B. Mathur and David B. Reichling, the …show more content…
Participants were selected using Amazon Mechanical Turk, which pays participants for completing online surveys. The faces were randomized and subjects were told to fill out a questionnaire, rating each face on how mechanical/human it was and if positive or negative emotion was displayed. A near perfect correlation between mechanical/human resemblance allowed researchers to conclude that the faces used for testing did represent an accurate spectrum of android robots. Ratings of emotion were uncorrelated with mechanical/human resemblance, suggesting that the facial expressions of the androids would not distort the data in subsequent parts of the experiment. Furthermore, 15 of the 80 faces were randomly selected and rated in a randomized order by subjects to measure the likability of each face from creepy to most-friendly/pleasing. The results of these ratings showed that likeability rose to a certain point but declined as intermediate human-likeness increased. Likeability increased again when the robots were almost fully human-like, a trend that is characteristic of the Uncanny Valley (Mathur & Reichling, 2015). The final part of the experiment involved testing subjects’ perception of trust …show more content…
The implementation of the game-theory simulation also allowed for experimenters to see how deep the effects of the Uncanny Valley could penetrate social behavior between human and robots. ‘Uncanny Valley’ was shown by experimenters to be more than just a superficial condition, as it also affected cognitive behavior that is central to how we judge others. This experiment is a prime example of Cognitive Science in action since analyzing the human psychology behind the Uncanny Valley could shape how robotic engineers design androids in the future, taking into account that people are more receptive to robots that are either mechanical or fully human and unreceptive to an intermediate of the two. This study also opens up opportunities for further research into ‘theory of mind’ since subjects in the investment game could be presumed as having attributed various degrees of mental states to the spectrum of robots, which included thoughts and