| Sumario: | Humans experience a sense of uncanniness when encountering human-like robots, a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley. Although the underlying mechanism remains unclear, the categorization failure hypothesis suggests that the visual system automatically attempts – but fails – to categorize the perceived object, leading to a negative affective response. However, it remains uncertain whether this categorization process does indeed occur automatically. This study examined whether the uncanny valley effect is triggered automatically by a task-irrelevant dimension. Participants categorized the colour of a morphed figure that previously elicited the uncanny valley effect based on shape, and then rated its likeability. Despite successful colour-based categorization of the figure, participants exhibited the uncanny valley effect based on the task-irrelevant shape dimension. These findings imply that the visual system processes an object's shape automatically, and incorporates this information into affective evaluation, supporting the categorization failure hypothesis.
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