Department of Psychology, University of Guelph Guelph, ON, Canada.
Department of Psychology, Carleton University Ottawa, ON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2015 Jan 21;5:1488. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01488. eCollection 2014.
The uncanny valley (UCV) hypothesis describes a non-linear relationship between perceived human-likeness and affective response. The "uncanny valley" refers to an intermediate level of human-likeness that is associated with strong negative affect. Recent studies have suggested that the uncanny valley might result from the categorical perception of human-like stimuli during identification. When presented with stimuli sharing human-like traits, participants attempt to segment the continuum in "human" and "non-human" categories. Due to the ambiguity of stimuli located at a category boundary, categorization difficulty gives rise to a strong, negative affective response. Importantly, researchers who have studied the UCV in terms of categorical perception have focused on categorization responses rather than affective ratings. In the present study, we examined whether the negative affect associated with the UCV might be explained in terms of an individual's degree of exposure to stimuli. In two experiments, we tested a frequency-based model against a categorical perception model using a category-learning paradigm. We manipulated the frequency of exemplars that were presented to participants from two categories during a training phase. We then examined categorization and affective responses functions, as well as the relationship between categorization and affective responses. Supporting previous findings, categorization responses suggested that participants acquired novel category structures that reflected a category boundary. These category structures appeared to influence affective ratings of eeriness. Crucially, participants' ratings of eeriness were additionally affected by exemplar frequency. Taken together, these findings suggest that the UCV is determined by both categorical properties as well as the frequency of individual exemplars retained in memory.
奇异谷(UCV)假说描述了感知的类人性和情感反应之间的非线性关系。“奇异谷”是指与强烈负面情绪相关的中等程度的类人性。最近的研究表明,奇异谷可能是由于在识别过程中对类人刺激的类别知觉所致。当呈现具有类人特征的刺激时,参与者试图在“人类”和“非人类”类别之间对连续体进行分割。由于位于类别边界的刺激具有模糊性,分类困难会导致强烈的负面情感反应。重要的是,研究奇异谷的分类知觉的研究人员关注的是分类反应而不是情感评价。在本研究中,我们检验了奇异谷所伴随的负面情感是否可以用个体对刺激的暴露程度来解释。在两个实验中,我们使用类别学习范式来检验基于频率的模型与类别知觉模型。在训练阶段,我们操纵了两个类别中呈现给参与者的示例的频率。然后,我们检查了分类和情感反应函数,以及分类和情感反应之间的关系。支持先前的发现,分类反应表明参与者获得了反映类别边界的新类别结构。这些类别结构似乎影响了怪异感的情感评价。至关重要的是,参与者对怪异感的评价还受到示例频率的影响。综上所述,这些发现表明,奇异谷不仅由类别属性决定,还由个体示例在记忆中保留的频率决定。