In “Navigating a social world with robot partners: A quantitative cartography of the Uncanny Valley”, Mathur and Reichling designed a lot of experiments to indicate that the Uncanny Valley is a real influence on humans’ perceptions of robots as social partners, and some subtle facial expressions would even influence subjects’ implicit decisions concerning robots’ social trustworthiness.

Authors worked hard to minimize the biases during the experiments. There were two complementary and novel methods of stimulus creation. One is objective selection a large number of sample of real-world android robots, but concerns would be “robot faces images available through an Internet search may be a biased representation of the total possible range of robots”. Therefore, they digitally created a novel set of robot faces with tightly controlled morphometry, expression, and presentation. Wild-type sample and digitally composed robot face stimuli both lead to same findings. Likability increased with increasing human-resemblance beyond the nearly neutral reactions elicited by the most mechanical robots, but as faces became more human than mechanical, robots were perceived as unlikable, and as faces became nearly human, liability sharply rebounded to a positive ending point. In addition, robots showing more positive emotion were perceived as more likeable. The article is rigorous and it would have further influences, as the ending state “our innovative methods of assessing human social perceptions of android robots in relation to their degree of mechano-humanness provide tools for further studies into social psychological and affective factors that could inform the design of socially competent robots”.

I like what the authors mentioned in the beginning that people who interact with robots nowadays are increasingly unlikely to be technically trained experts and thus more likely to use casual intuitive approaches to the interaction. And as we discussed before in the class, the article also mentioned that “humans often have unexpectedly uncomfortable reactions to robots that were designed to have pleasant social interactions with humans”. How to develop a welcoming robot is always a difficult problem to consider.