When do babies enter the uncanny valley?
In the 1970s the roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed a curious phenomenon. As robots became more human-like, their appeal increases - but only up to a point. When their human likeness became too realistic, their appeal plunges. Mori nicknamed this abrupt aversion "the uncanny valley", in reference to the shape of the graph mapping human-likeness and appeal.
Are we born with this aversion to the almost-real or does it emerge later? A new study reported on our Research Digest set out to find the answer.
