ReviewFrontiers in psychology2015
A review of empirical evidence on different uncanny valley hypotheses: support for perceptual mismatch as one road to the valley of eeriness.
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 65 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
65 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The uncanny valley effect in embodied conversational agents: a critical systematic review of attractiveness, anthropomorphism, and uncanniness.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Recognition of real and artificial intelligence-generated faces.Perception · 2026Article
- Towards Real-World Dementia Care: Encouraging Activity Engagement Using an Intelligent Humanoid Robot.Journal of applied gerontology : the official journal of the Southern Gerontological Society · 2026Article
- Human-like, Animal-like, or Object-like? The Impact of LLM-Based Virtual Doctor Avatar Design on User Emotion, Physiology, and Experience.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Neural responses to virtual avatars are shaped by user preference and personality traits.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Global and Local Processing of Letters and Faces in Children and Adolescents with Typical and Atypical Development.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Stability of value perception: minimal influence of framing on moral attributions to a humanoid robot.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Examining the influence of the domestic social robot anthropomorphism on users' perceived affinity via intelligent design process: robot social presence as a mediator.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Understanding the influence of AI labels on consumer psychology: the moderating role of product type.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Humanlikeness as design, anthropomorphism as inference: a conceptual framework for human-robot interaction.Frontiers in cognition · 2026Review
- AI-generated images of familiar faces are indistinguishable from real photographs.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- From Trust in Automation to Trust in AI in Healthcare: A 30-Year Longitudinal Review and an Interdisciplinary Framework.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Born to Fear the Machine? Genetic and Environmental Influences on Negative Attitudes toward AI Agents.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Let's talk about "talking" dogs! Reviewing the science behind a bold idea.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Article
- Realness of face images can be decoded from non-linear modulation of EEG responses.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Ascribing consciousness to artificial intelligence: human-AI interaction and its carry-over effects on human-human interaction.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- A review of level-1 visual perspective-taking: potential relationship with the uncanny valley effect.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Dancing robots: aesthetic engagement is shaped by stimulus and knowledge cues to human animacy.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- The Open Virtual Mirror Framework for enfacement illusions : Enhancing the sense of agency with avatars that imitate facial expressions.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
5 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The uncanny valley hypothesis, proposed already in the 1970s, suggests that almost but not fully humanlike artificial characters will trigger a profound sense of unease. This hypothesis has become widely acknowledged both in the popular media and scientific research. Surprisingly, empirical evidence for the hypothesis has remained inconsistent. In the present article, we reinterpret the original uncanny valley hypothesis and review empirical evidence for different theoretically motivated uncanny valley hypotheses. The uncanny valley could be understood as the naïve claim that any kind of human-likeness manipulation will lead to experienced negative affinity at close-to-realistic levels. More recent hypotheses have suggested that the uncanny valley would be caused by artificial-human categorization difficulty or by a perceptual mismatch between artificial and human features. Original formulation also suggested that movement would modulate the uncanny valley. The reviewed empirical literature failed to provide consistent support for the naïve uncanny valley hypothesis or the modulatory effects of movement. Results on the categorization difficulty hypothesis were still too scarce to allow drawing firm conclusions. In contrast, good support was found for the perceptual mismatch hypothesis. Taken together, the present review findings suggest that the uncanny valley exists only under specific conditions. More research is still needed to pinpoint the exact conditions under which the uncanny valley phenomenon manifests itself.
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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.