Slanted Science

Well, it’s been a busy week for scientists looking into how like humans macaque monkeys are. Just a few days after we were told that monkey mothers ‘baby’ their children in the same way human moms do, scientists have just described research showing that they are also vaguely disturbed by computer-generated depictions of other monkeys.The work has been going on at Princeton University’s Neuroscience Institute, under control of assistant professor Asif Ghazanfar.

The researchers have been looking at whether monkeys are susceptible to entering the ‘Uncanny Valley‘, a concept which was named by a Japanese robotics researcher in the 1970s.

You might not know the term, but you’ll definitely have experienced the feeling: it’s that one you get when looking at something – a robot, a cartoon, a computer animation – which was designed to look very human-like, but about which something is just not right. Like those damn creepy dolls which grandmothers seem to love buying. Ugh.

Or the image at the top of this story, which was created by professional monkey-frightener Shawn Steckenfinger of Princeton. When macaques were shown images such as these – computer-generated representations of a macaque, but slightly less than realistic – they displayed nervous behavior, such as looking away from the faces. When shown less-realistic images, or photographs of real macaques, the monkeys displayed the expected responses, such as lip-smacking.

Nice work, as it shows the reality of this odd, thus-far unexplained psychological oddity. The researchers propose that their work demonstrates that the neurological mechanisms causing the uncanny valley effect are evolutionary-conserved adaptations to…something.

Quite what, I’m not sure. Will we one day find evidence that thousands of a-bit-too-real porcelain dolls once roamed the ancient African grasslands? (There’s a movie in there. A really terrible movie, which would probably star Matt Damon as the caveman who saves the future. Or something.)

Don’t Hold Your Breath, But This May Lead To: the Japanese being told to stop making those robotic models of women, the ones that get onto the news channels once every year or so and really creep us all out.