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The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis about robotics concerning the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities. It was introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, although draws heavily on Ernst Jentsch's concept of "the uncanny," identified in a 1906 essay, "On the Psychology of the Uncanny." Jentsch's conception is famously elaborated upon by Sigmund Freud in a 1919 essay, simply entitled "The Uncanny" ("Das Unheimliche").

Mori's hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes strongly repulsive. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being's, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-human empathy levels.

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely-human" and "fully human" entity is called the Uncanny Valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is "almost human" will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the requisite empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

Hypothesized emotional response of human subjects is plotted against anthropomorphism of a robot, following Mori's statements. The Uncanny Valley is the region of negative emotional response towards robots that seem "almost human". Movement amplifies the emotional response.

The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer.

Another possibility is that affected individuals and corpses exhibit many visual anomalies similar to the ones seen with humanoid robots and so elicit the same alarm and revulsion. The reaction may become worse with robots since there is no overt reason for it to occur, whereas distaste for the sight of a corpse is an easy feeling to understand. Behavioural anomalies are also indicative of illness, neurological conditions or mental dysfunction and again evoke acutely negative emotions.

It can also be explained in terms of evolutionary psychology. Entities that fall in the uncanny valley are humanlike enough to be seen as part of the human being species. According to evolutionary psychology, throughout millions of years, natural selection would have logically favored features in the brain that provide a high capacity to sense and be repulsed by macro and micro-anomalies in the overall appearance of a member of the same species that reveal genetic disorders or a lack of genetic fitness. So, we might be alarmed by the potential impact that these abnormal humanlike entities could have on the human gene pool. This could explain why it is particularly disturbing for the human eye to see these humanlike entities engaging in sexual activity (see below).

Some roboticists have heavily criticized the theory, arguing that Mori had no basis for the rightmost part of his chart, as human-like robots are only now technically possible (and still only partially). David Hanson, a roboticist who developed a realistic robotic copy of his girlfriend's head, said the idea of the Uncanny Valley is "really pseudoscientific, but people treat it like it is science." Sara Kiesler, a human-robot interaction researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, questioned Uncanny Valley's scientific status, noting that "we have evidence that it’s true, and evidence that it’s not."

• Uncanny Valley in popular culture
• Android science
• Anthropomorphobia
• Bunraku
• Frankenstein complex
• Gynoid
• Virtual Woman

• Mori, Masahiro (1970). Bukimi no tani The uncanny valley (K. F. MacDorman & T. Minato, Trans.). Energy, 7(4), 33–35. (Originally in Japanese)
• Mori, Masahiro (2005). On the Uncanny Valley. Proceedings of the Humanoids-2005 workshop: Views of the Uncanny Valley. 5 December 2005, Tsukuba, Japan.
• MacDorman, Karl F. (2005). Androids as an experimental apparatus: Why is there an uncanny valley and can we exploit it? CogSci-2005 Workshop: Toward Social Mechanisms of Android Science, 106-118. (An English translation of Mori's "The Uncanny Valley" made by Karl MacDorman and Takashi Minato appears in Appendix B of the paper.)
• MacDorman, Karl F. & Ishiguro, H. (2006). The uncanny advantage of using androids in cognitive science research. Interaction Studies, 7(3), 297-337.
• MacDorman, K. F. (2006). Subjective ratings of robot video clips for human likeness, familiarity, and eeriness: An exploration of the uncanny valley. ICCS/CogSci-2006 Long Symposium: Toward Social Mechanisms of Android Science. July 26, 2005. Vancouver, Canada.
• IEEE-RAS Humanoids-2005 Workshop: Views on the Uncanny Valley. Was held in Tsukuba, Japan, near Tokyo on December 5, 2005.
• The Man Who Mistook His Girlfriend For A Robot (Dan Ferber, Popular Science, September 2003)
• The Uncanny Valley (Dave Bryant)
• Almost too human and lifelike for comfort - research journal for an uncanny valley PhD project
• Relation between motion and appearance is communication between androids and humans
• Android Science video, the Discovery Channel, 24 March 2005, discusses android science, the uncanny valley and features an Actroid.
• Wired article: "Why is this man smiling?", June 2002.
• The Polar Express: A Virtual Train Wreck, Part 1 - Animation Director Ward Jenkins discusses in length about the use of motion capture in the film. In Part 2, he tries to "fix" the uncanny valley problem by using Photoshop to tweak some of the characters in the film.