Uncanny valley, robot and autism: Perception of the uncanniness in an emotional gait

Abstract

While robots are often used in autism therapy, the Uncanny valley effect was never studied in subjects with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Since persons with ASD have trouble understanding body language, they react differently to the Uncanny valley. In this paper, we propose to investigate the possible difference in the Uncanny valley's perception of an emotional humanoid robot in subjects with ASD and subjects without ASD. Thirty four adult participants (N = 34, control: 19, ASD: 15; age: 28.5) were asked to watch videos of an emotional humanoid robot and rate its emotions and its gait (Perceived Humanness, Eeriness and Attractiveness). We have found differences between the two groups in their perception of the robot's Perceived Humanness (p <.05). Also, while the ASD group performed as well as the control group for emotion recognition task, we found that the ASD group is more sensible to the Uncanny valley effects than the control group. Finally we conclude on what our findings bring to the Human Robot Interaction field.