ArticleFrontiers in psychology2018
Those Virtual People all Look the Same to me: Computer-Rendered Faces Elicit a Higher False Alarm Rate Than Real Human Faces in a Recognition Memory Task.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Caffeine reduces accuracy in face recognition memory consolidation.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Does artificiality matter? Comparing working memory performance for artificial and real faces.Psychological research · 2026Article
- I remember (and forget) your happy smiling face: Directed forgetting of emotionally expressive faces of in-group and out-group members.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- EGEFACE: A new face memory test with static and dynamic images.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- A review of level-1 visual perspective-taking: potential relationship with the uncanny valley effect.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Asynchrony enhances uncanniness in human, android, and virtual dynamic facial expressions.BMC research notes · 2023Article
- Article
- What is the prevalence of developmental prosopagnosia? An empirical assessment of different diagnostic cutoffs.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2023Article
- The rise and fall of face recognition awareness across the life span.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2023Article
- On the realness of people who do not exist: The social processing of artificial faces.iScience · 2022Article
- Corneal reflections and skin contrast yield better memory of human and virtual faces.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022Article
- Familiarity, orientation, and realism increase face uncanniness by sensitizing to facial distortions.Journal of vision · 2022Article
- Creepy cats and strange high houses: Support for configural processing in testing predictions of nine uncanny valley theories.Journal of vision · 2021Article
- Diagnosing developmental prosopagnosia: repeat assessment using the Cambridge Face Memory Test.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Virtual as compared with real human characters can elicit a sense of uneasiness in human observers, characterized by lack of familiarity and even feelings of eeriness (the "uncanny valley" hypothesis). Here we test the possibility that this alleged lack of familiarity is literal in the sense that people have lesser perceptual expertise in processing virtual as compared with real human faces. Sixty-four participants took part in a recognition memory study in which they first learned a set of faces and were then asked to recognize them in a testing session. We used real and virtual (computer-rendered) versions of the same faces, presented in either upright or inverted orientation. Real and virtual faces were matched for low-level visual features such as global luminosity and spatial frequency contents. Our results demonstrated a higher response bias toward responding "seen before" for virtual as compared with real faces, which was further explained by a higher false alarm rate for the former. This finding resembles a similar effect for recognizing human faces from other than one's own ethnic groups (the "other race effect"). Virtual faces received clearly higher subjective eeriness ratings than real faces. Our results did not provide evidence of poorer overall recognition memory or lesser inversion effect for virtual faces, however. The higher false alarm rate finding supports the notion that lesser perceptual expertise may contribute to the lack of subjective familiarity with virtual faces. We discuss alternative interpretations and provide suggestions for future research.
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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.