Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Crossing The ‘Uncanny Valley’: Adaptation To Cartoon Faces Can Influence Perception Of Human Faces, Haiwen Chen, Richard Russell, Ken Nakayama, Margaret Livingstone

Psychology Faculty Publications

In this study we assessed whether there is a single face space common to both human and cartoon faces by testing whether adaptation to cartoon faces can affect perception of human faces. Participants were shown Japanese animation cartoon videos containing faces with abnormally large eyes. The use of animated videos eliminated the possibility of position-dependent retinotopic adaptation (because the faces appear at many different locations) and more closely simulated naturalistic exposure. Adaptation to cartoon faces with large eyes significantly shifted preferences for human faces toward larger eyes, consistent with a common, non-retinotopic representation for both cartoon and human faces. This …