Navigating a social world with robot partners: A quantitative cartography of the Uncanny Valley

Source record mathur-reichling-2016-cartography · 2016 · Cognition
Evidence tier: B (peer-reviewed-journal) · Verification: verified-abstract (compiler confidence: high)
Bottom line: Demonstrated an uncanny valley in explicit likability of real robot faces that extended to implicit trust decisions; category confusion may occur but did not mediate the effect.

Citation

Maya B. Mathur, David B. Reichling (2016). Navigating a social world with robot partners: A quantitative cartography of the Uncanny Valley. Cognition, 146, 22-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.09.008

Verification entry (identifiers, resolvers, claims with source locations): /data/citations.json#mathur-reichling-2016-cartography

Study design

Field	Value
Design	Ratings of 80 objectively sampled real-world robot faces plus a controlled set of edited faces; explicit likability; implicit trust via an investment game
Modality	robot-face
Stimuli	80 real robot faces; digitally edited face series
Participants (N)	not recorded
N detail	not in abstract
Topics	uncanny-valley, trust, valley-shape

Results

Metric	Value	Note
Explicit likability	uncanny valley present
Implicit trust (investment game)	valley extends to trust decisions	driven by subtle facial-expression cues also used for humans
Category confusion	may occur; does not mediate likability effect	preliminary

Mechanism relevance

against-categorization-ambiguity

Limitations

Static images
Robot faces, not synthetic human faces

Cited in

MR-0002: The Uncanny Valley and Synthetic Media: Does It Exist, What Causes It, and Have Deepfakes Crossed It?

Verification

Field	Value
Status	`verified-abstract`
Compiler confidence	high
Checked on	2026-10-07
Via	Semantic Scholar API abstract

Values on this page have not all been checked against the full text. Confirm them against the primary source before high-stakes use.