Abstract
The uncanny valley (UV) hypothesis suggests that the observation of almost human-like characters causes an increase of discomfort. We conducted a study using self-report questionnaire, response time measurement, and electrodermal activity (EDA) evaluation. In the study, 12 computer-generated characters (robots, androids, animated, and human characters) were presented to 33 people (17 women) to (1) test the effect of a background context on the perception of characters, (2) establish whether there is a relation between declared feelings and physiological arousal, and (3) detect the valley of the presented stimuli. The findings provide support for reverse relation between human-likeness and the arousal (EDA). Furthermore, a positive correlation between EDA and human-likeness appraisal reaction time upholds one of the most common explanations of the UV – the categorization ambiguity. The absence of the significant relationship between declared comfort and EDA advocates the necessity of physiological measures for UV studies.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to give their thanks to Dagmara Dziedzic and Wojciech Włodarczyk for preparation of models and also to Mikołaj Buchwald for comments on a draft of this paper.
Ethical Approval: The conducted research is not related to either human or animal use.
Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.
Research funding: None declared.
Employment or leadership: None declared.
Honorarium: None declared.
Competing interests: The funding organization(s) played no role in the study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the report for publication.
Conflict of interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/bams-2019-0008).
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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