When Does an Android Become a Creepazoid?

The uncanny valley is a place no one wants to be. Somewhere between machine and human, the theory goes, robots take a dive into creepiness. But roboticists aren't sure the valley really exists. Now, researchers in California say they have new evidence for this icky zone, and they can even draw a map of it. Robotics professor Masahiro Mori first proposed the uncanny valley in 1970. The idea feels right—certainly some robots are charming and others, especially androids not quite succeeding at looking human, are a little stomach turning. (An android is a robot designed like a person.) But studies trying to pinpoint this valley have had mixed results. A 2015 review concluded that evidence for the uncanny valley is, at best, ambiguous. Maya Mathur, a biostatistician at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and David Reichling, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, thought they could do ...