Abstract
The “uncanny phenomenon” describes the feeling of unease associated with seeing an image that is close to appearing human. Prosthetic hands in particular are well known to induce this effect. Little is known, however, about this phenomenon from the viewpoint of prosthesis users. We studied perceptions of eeriness and human-likeness for images of different types of mechanical, cosmetic, and anatomic hands in upper-limb prosthesis users (n=9), lower-limb prosthesis users (n=10), prosthetists (n=16), control participants with no prosthetic training (n=20), and control participants who were trained to use a myoelectric prosthetic hand simulator (n=23). Both the upper- and lower-limb prosthesis user groups showed a reduced uncanny phenomenon (i.e., significantly lower levels of eeriness) for cosmetic prosthetic hands compared to the other groups, with no concomitant reduction in how these stimuli were rated in terms of human-likeness. However, a similar effect was found neither for prosthetists with prolonged visual experience of prosthetic hands nor for the group with short-term training with the simulator. These findings in the prosthesis users therefore seem likely to be related to limb absence or prolonged experience with prostheses.
Highlights
The Buncanny valley^ describes the experience of unease or repulsion in the presence of an object that falls just short of being human (Mori, 1970)
The Buncanny phenomenon^ is most frequently experienced in the context of computer-generated animations of human faces, or interactive robots, and much of the research in the topic is focused on computer-science domains (Destephe et al, 2015; MacDorman, Green, Ho, & Koch, 2009)
We compared the ratings of eeriness and human-likeness for images of mechanical, unrealistic, realistic, and anatomic hands for a group of university students, a group of upper-limb prosthesis users, a group of lower-limb prosthesis users, a group of prosthetists, and a group of anatomically intact subjects who had received extensive training on a myoelectric prosthesis simulator
Summary
The Buncanny valley^ describes the experience of unease or repulsion in the presence of an object that falls just short of being human (Mori, 1970). Uncertain findings related to the shape of the valley’s Bdistribution,^ combined with the obvious difficulties in defining human-likeness, has led some researchers to adopt the term Buncanny phenomenon^ to describe the feeling of unease associated with broadly human-like stimuli, without making any assumptions as to the dimensionality of the underpinning distribution (Wang, Lilienfeld, & Rochat, 2015) The mechanism underpinning this phenomenon is widely debated, but recent studies suggest that it might represent the conflict between a biological appearance and other features, such as temperature, hardness, and exhibiting non-biological kinematics (Kätsyri, Förger, Mäkäräinen, & Takala, 2015; Saygin, Chaminade, Ishiguro, Driver, & Frith, 2012). The relevance of the uncanny phenomenon to prosthetic hands was strong enough for Mori, in his original article (1970), to even suggest that prosthetic designers eschew life-like materials altogether when developing new limbs
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