ArticleDevelopmental psychobiology2012
The development of the uncanny valley in infants.
Article in Developmental psychobiology, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Robots with display screens: a robot with a more humanlike face display is perceived to have more mind and a better personality.PloS one · 2013Trial
- Realistic monkey body animation reveals an uncanny valley in macaque body perception.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- A novel approach to exploring infant gaze patterns with AI-manipulated videos.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- People with Autism Spectrum Disorder Could Interact More Easily with a Robot than with a Human: Reasons and Limits.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Human vs. machine-like representation in chatbot mental health counseling: the serial mediation of psychological distance and trust on compliance intention.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2023Article
- Monkey visual attention does not fall into the uncanny valley.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Learning Through Shared Care : Allomaternal Care Impacts Cognitive Development in Early Infancy in a Western Population.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2021Article
- Creepy cats and strange high houses: Support for configural processing in testing predictions of nine uncanny valley theories.Journal of vision · 2021Article
- Young Children's Indiscriminate Helping Behavior Toward a Humanoid Robot.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Upper- and lower-limb amputees show reduced levels of eeriness for images of prosthetic hands.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2019Article
- Comparative thanatology, an integrative approach: exploring sensory/cognitive aspects of death recognition in vertebrates and invertebrates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- The uncanny valley effect in typically developing children and its absence in children with autism spectrum disorders.PloS one · 2018Article
- Avoidance of Novelty Contributes to the Uncanny Valley.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
- Understanding the Uncanny: Both Atypical Features and Category Ambiguity Provoke Aversion toward Humanlike Robots.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
- Ethorobotics: A New Approach to Human-Robot Relationship.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Review
- Infant discrimination of humanoid robots.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Article
- A Bayesian Model of the Uncanny Valley Effect for Explaining the Effects of Therapeutic Robots in Autism Spectrum Disorder.PloS one · 2015Article
- Early experience and multisensory perceptual narrowing.Developmental psychobiology · 2014Review
- Uncanny sociocultural categories.Frontiers in psychology · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
When adults view very realistic humanoid robots or computer avatars they often exhibit an aversion to them. This phenomenon, known as the "uncanny valley," is assumed to be evolutionary in origin, perhaps tapping into modules for disgust or attractiveness that detect violations of our normal expectations regarding social signals. Here, we test an alternative hypothesis that the uncanny valley is developmental in origin and, thus, that specific early experience with real human faces leads to its eventual emergence. To test this idea, we measured visual preferences in response to all possible pairs of a human face, realistic avatar face, and an unrealistic avatar face in groups of 6-, 8-, 10-, and 12-month-old infants. Consistent with the developmental hypothesis, we found that the uncanny valley effect emerges at 12 months of age suggesting that perceptual experience with real human faces is critical to its emergence.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.