Human Brains On Androids.

The phenomenon has been described un-imaginable for years, but how and why this happens is still a subject of debate in robotics, computer graphics and neuroscience.
The term "uncanny valley" refers to an artificial agent's drop in likeability when it becomes too humanlike. People respond positively to an agent that shares some characteristics with humans -- think dolls, cartoon animals, R2D2. As the agent becomes more human-like, it becomes more likeable. But at some point that upward trajectory stops and instead the agent is perceived as strange and disconcerting.And most modern androids, including the Japanese Repliee Q2 used here, are also thought to fall into the uncanny valley.The biggest difference in brain response is the android condition -- in the parietal cortex, on both sides of the brain, specifically in the areas that connect the part of the brain's visual cortex that processes bodily movements with the section of the motor cortex thought to contain mirror neurons.
The brain doesn't seem tuned to care about either biological appearance or biological motion per se.In other words, if it looks human and moves likes a human, we are OK with that. If it looks like a robot and acts like a robot, we are OK with that, too; our brains have no difficulty processing the information. The trouble arises when -- contrary to a lifetime of expectations -- appearance and motion are at odds.

The brain "lit up" when the human-like appearance of the android and its robotic motion "didn't compute.

"As human-like artificial agents become more commonplace, perhaps our perceptual systems will be re-tuned to accommodate these new social partners."Or perhaps, we will decide it is not a good idea to make them so closely in our image after all."