Congruency Matters - How Ambiguous Gender Cues Increase a Robot's Uncanniness

摘要

Most research on the uncanny valley effect is concerned with the influence of human-likeness and realism as a trigger of an uncanny feeling in humans. There has been a lack of investigation on the effect of other dimensions, for example, gender. Back-projected robotic heads allow us to alter visual cues in the appearance of the robot in order to investigate how the perception of it changes. In this paper, we study the influence of gender on the perceived uncanniness. We conducted an experiment with 48 participants in which we used different modalities of interaction to change the strength of the gender cues in the robot. Results show that incongruence in the gender cues of the robot, and not its specific gender, influences the uncanniness of the back-projected robotic head. This finding has potential implications for both the perceptual mismatch and categorization ambiguity theory as a general explanation of the uncanny valley effect.