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Deric Bownds' MindBlog: Like us, monkeys don't like computer faces that are 'too real'.

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Deric Bownds' MindBlog: Like us, monkeys don't like computer faces that are 'too real'.
Description
Very realistic human-looking robots or computer avatars tend to elicit negative feelings in human observers. This phenomenon is known as the “uncanny valley” response. It is hypothesized that this uncanny feeling is because the realistic synthetic characters elicit the concept of “human,” but fail to live up to it. That is, this failure generates feelings of unease due to character traits falling outside the expected spectrum of everyday social experience. These unsettling emotions are thought to have an evolutionary origin, but tests of this hypothesis have not been forthcoming. To bridge this gap, 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.
Original URL
http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2009/11/like-us-monkeys-dont-like-computer.html#

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    • Graeme Smith Graeme Smith
      6 weeks ago


      This should not be as surprising as it seems to the researcher. Unrealistic Synthetic faces usually do not have the detail or jibe with expectations of facial norms. From an evolutionary perspective, faces that fall outside a certain norm, indicate health problems in the facial owner, or are an indication of a difference in race. If they fall further out of the norm such as in Hentai or Manga where the eyes are subtly enlarged in order to increase their impact, and suggest younger faces, then the attractive forces can out perform the rejective forces that are linked to social stigma of subtle differences in skin tone, facial shape, or color of hair. Blonds really do have more fun, if only because blond hair falls outside the norm of brown and black hair far enough that it is not seen as a mutation of the norm but as a desireable characteristic. People with red and mousy brown hair are not seen as attractive, In comparison, because their hair falls too close to the norm, and thus indicates a possible subtle shift in the norm, that might indicate disease. It is the same reason why we will line up for truly grotesque people like the elephant man, and ignore merely ugly people like the famous Betty in Ugly Betty.

      It should be no surprise to find that many of the people who have mental illness, also have physical characteristics that fall just outside the expected boundaries of the social norm, one wonders how much of their symptoms come from social rejection, and how much comes from subtle shifts in DNA that put them outside the "Accepted" population. Perhaps, in some cases the DNA has detected a loss of function and has tagged it with a change in morphology that is subtle but places the individual just outside the norm, and thus makes them less attractive to the normal population. This might be a way of breeding outliers back into the norm, by attracting extremes to their opposites in order to reduce genomic variety.

      Such a mechanism of rejection of almost but not quite good enough facial features, and attraction of opposites, would have an increased evolutionary value, Because it would concentrate the population of the next generation in the statistical norm. Because of the nature of evolution, without some such effect, species would be much more unstable and would probably fail to have recognizeable characteristics such as we use to form our Taxa.
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First Posted By

Javed Alam

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Graeme Smith

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