Macaques are creeped out by cyber-selves

14 October 2009 by Jessica Hamzelou

IT TURNS out monkeys are as creeped out by their CGI counterparts as we are. Show them a monkey face that's uncannily life-like and they look away. This might mean that there is an evolutionary explanation for our disgust of non-humans who seem too real.

In the 1970s, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed that, although we like robots that have some human features, we start to find them eerie when they look too real. He called this dip in humanoid popularity the "uncanny valley". Since then, the response has been blamed for the unpopularity of some CGI films with realistic characters, and it is touted as the reason Pixar stuck to characters with cartoonish features.

Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain the uncanny valley. One idea is that it is an evolved response to something that's not healthy and normal. Another suggestion is that it's got more to do with social taboos about death because human-like, non-humans look like corpses and remind us of our own mortality.

Asif Ghazanfar and Shawn Steckenfinger of Princeton University wondered how five macaques would respond to monkey avatars. They found that the monkeys spent less time looking at the most realistic avatars - which they say suggests they dislike them (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0910063106).

"These primates don't participate in human culture, which suggests the uncanny valley has a biological basis," says Karl MacDorman of Indiana University in Indianapolis.

Ultimately, Ghazanfar and Steckenfinger hope to get their monkeys to "climb out" of the uncanny valley and use the avatars as substitutes for real monkeys in social interaction experiments. They hope the experiments could shed light on human communication disorders like autism.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427303.800-macaques-are-creeped-out-by-cyberselves.html

(Submitted by Tim Chapman)