Kappas, A

Krumhuber, E

Swiderska, A

UCL Discovery

Perception of Animacy in Caucasian and Indian FacesAleksandra Swiderska∗, Eva Krumhuber, Arvid KappasJacobs University BremenFigure 1: The faces’ continua from real (1) to artiﬁcial (50) face. Animacy boundary is marked in red (mean number of face perceived as nolonger alive: 18.70 for Caucasians and 22.57 for Indians, p < .001.1 IntroductionMasahiro Mori, who introduced the concept of the Uncanny Val-ley, recommended settling for moderate levels of human likeness inrobotic design in order to avoid the eeriness upon encountering en-tities closely resembling humans [Mori 1970]. However, the strivefor highly humanlike design continues, nowadays particularly in ar-eas such as computer graphics and animation, inspiring research onwhat actually is and what is not perceived as a human being.Using real and computer-generated faces as well as a range ofmorphs between the two, it can be demonstrated that at some pointalong a continuum of morphs between a completely human andcompletely artiﬁcial face, people stop attributing aliveness to theface even if the general appearance of the artiﬁcial face perfectlymatches that of the real face. This point is referred to as the ani-macy boundary and has been shown to fall rather close to the humanendpoint of the continuum [Looser and Wheatley 2010].2 Our ApproachBased on psychological theories on intergroup perception and prej-udice (e.g., [Harris and Fiske 2006]), it may be expected that peo-ple’s attribution of aliveness to faces would depend on group mem-bership that the faces indicate. The purpose of the present researchwas therefore to investigate whether the perception of the animacyboundary would be inﬂuenced by the ethnicity of the face. Specif-ically, we hypothesized that the point at which the animacy bound-ary is detected would differ for Caucasian and Indian faces, as eval-uated by Caucasian participants.60 Caucasian students atWarsawUniversity, Poland, participated inthis study. Materials comprised photographs of neutral faces of 10Caucasian and 10 Indian men. Additionally, a series of 48 morphsbetween each of these faces and their artiﬁcial analogues were cre-ated. The analogues were produced via modifying the surface ofthe skin, eyes, and hair of the real faces from the photographs (fa-cial morphology was preserved). Thus, this added up to 50 versions∗e-mail: a.swiderska@jacobs-university.deof each face (real face, 48 morphs, and artiﬁcial face).Participants viewed either the Caucasian or Indian faces’ continuabeginning at the real endpoint and progressing through the morphsuntil the artiﬁcial endpoint. Their task was to determine the pointat which the faces did not look alive anymore. That is, they were toﬁnd the perceived animacy boundary (see Figure 1).3 ResultsThe results showed a signiﬁcant difference in where the animacyboundary was perceived depending on the faces’ ethnicity. Partic-ipants evaluated the animacy boundary for Caucasian faces to fallcloser to the human endpoint of the morphs’ continua in compari-son to Indian faces (see Figure 1). Work in the area of animationhas been focused mainly on increasing the realism of computer-generated faces but this ﬁnding suggests that it might be also im-portant to take factors such as the ethnicity of both viewers andcharacters into account while developing humanlike design of ani-mated characters. Thus, psychological processes play an importantrole in how alive a face appears to be and require consideration inﬁelds of computer graphics and human-computer interaction (HCI).Acknowledgments This work has been supported by the EuropeanCommission project eCUTE – Education in Cultural Understand-ing, Technologically-Enhanced (FP7-ICT-257666).ReferencesHARRIS, L. T., AND FISKE, S. T. 2006. Dehumanizing the low-est of the low: Neuroimaging responses to extreme outgroups.Psychological Science 17, 847–853.LOOSER, C. E., AND WHEATLEY, T. 2010. The tipping pointof animacy: How, when and where we perceive life in a face.Psychological Science 21, 1–9.MORI, M. 1970. The uncanny valley. Energy 7, 33–35.

Perception of animacy in Caucasian and Indian faces

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Perception of animacy in Caucasian and Indian faces

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