‘If our mechanical doubles make us paranoid, we may need to think again.’
November 26th, 2013Via: Telegraph:
Researchers have tried to find the cause of the uncanny valley. One of the most interesting insights has come from an international team led by Ayse Pinar Saygin of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
Saygin and her team conducted an experiment scanning the brains of 20 subjects aged 20 to 36 while they were looking at three different things: a human, a mechanical-looking robot, and a human-like robot.
Interpreting the results from the fMRI scans, the researchers suggested that the cause for the valley is a mismatch between at least two neural pathways: that of recognising a human-like face and that of recognising different kinds of movement. These pathways meet on the parietal cortex of the brain.
There, information from the visual cortex relating to bodily movement is integrated with information from the motor cortex that contains mirror neurons, the brain cells that register that what we are seeing is “one of us”. Alarm bells go off in the brain when there is a perceptual conflict between the human-like features of the robot and its inhuman movement.
This mismatch creates a feeling of revulsion similar to what we feel when looking at a movie zombie. We instinctively expect human-like creatures to have human-like movements. As Saygin says: “The brain doesn’t seem selectively tuned to either biological appearance or biological motion per se. What it seems to do is look for its expectations to be met – for appearance and motion to be congruent.”
