Investigating the Uncanny Valley Phenomenon Through the Temporal Dynamics of Neural Responses to Virtual Characters

Chiara Gorlini; Laurits Dixen; Paolo Burelli

doi:10.1109/CoG57401.2023.10333130

Investigating the Uncanny Valley Phenomenon Through the Temporal Dynamics of Neural Responses to Virtual Characters

Chiara Gorlini, Laurits Dixen, Paolo Burelli

Creative AI Lab

Research output: Conference Article in Proceeding or Book/Report chapter › Article in proceedings › Research › peer-review

Abstract

The Uncanny Valley phenomenon refers to the feeling of unease that arises when interacting with characters that appear almost, but not quite, human-like. First theorised by Masahiro Mori in 1970, it has since been widely observed in different contexts from humanoid robots to video games, in which it can result in players feeling uncomfortable or disconnected from the game, leading to a lack of immersion and potentially reducing the overall enjoyment. The phenomenon has been observed and described mostly through behavioural studies based on self-reported scales of uncanny feeling: however, there is still no consensus on its cognitive and perceptual origins, which limits our understanding of its impact on player experience. In this paper, we present a study aimed at identifying the mechanisms that trigger the uncanny response by collecting and analysing both self-reported feedback and EEG data.
Index Terms—Uncanny Valley, Virtual Characters, Video Games, EEG, ERP, Survey, Perception, Cognition

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Game
Publisher	IEEE
Publication date	2023
ISBN (Print)	979-8-3503-2278-1
ISBN (Electronic)	979-8-3503-2277-4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/CoG57401.2023.10333130
Publication status	Published - 2023

Series	Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE conference on Games

Keywords

Uncanny Valley
Human-like Characters
Masahiro Mori
Humanoid Robots
Player Immersion
Behavioural Studies
Self-reported Scales
Cognitive Origins
Perceptual Mechanisms
EEG Data
ERP
Video Game Experience
Player Feedback
Cognitive and Perceptual Origins
Human-Computer Interaction

Access to Document

10.1109/CoG57401.2023.10333130

IEEE_COG_2023___Uncanny_Valley_EEGProof, 3.03 MB

EEG Recordings of Exposure to Unrealistic, Semi-realistic and Realistic Character Faces
Gorlini, C. (Creator), Dixen, L. (Creator) & Burelli, P. (Creator), ZENODO, 18 May 2023
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7948158, https://zenodo.org/record/7948158
Dataset

Cite this

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Investigating the Uncanny Valley Phenomenon Through the Temporal Dynamics of Neural Responses to Virtual Characters. / Gorlini, Chiara; Dixen, Laurits ; Burelli, Paolo.
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Game. IEEE, 2023. (Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE conference on Games).

Research output: Conference Article in Proceeding or Book/Report chapter › Article in proceedings › Research › peer-review

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Investigating the Uncanny Valley Phenomenon Through the Temporal Dynamics of Neural Responses to Virtual Characters

Abstract

Keywords

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Datasets

EEG Recordings of Exposure to Unrealistic, Semi-realistic and Realistic Character Faces

Cite this