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About

David B. Reichling is a prominent researcher specializing in human-robot interaction, social cognition, and the psychology of anthropomorphism. He is best known for his pioneering empirical work on the "Uncanny Valley" phenomenon — the unsettling discomfort humans experience when encountering robots that closely, but imperfectly, resemble human beings. His landmark 2015 paper, "Navigating a Social World with Robot Partners," offered a rigorous quantitative cartography of the Uncanny Valley, accumulating over 430 citations and establishing a new empirical standard in a field previously plagued by methodological inconsistencies. Reichling's research has consistently pushed beyond theoretical speculation, using multisite studies and sophisticated cognitive tools to probe the perceptual and social mechanisms underlying human reactions to androids. His 2019 investigations into perceptual category confusion challenged prevailing assumptions about why the Uncanny Valley effect occurs, demonstrating that eeriness is not simply the product of category ambiguity between "robot" and "human." He has also contributed valuable open-source methodological tools, including mouse-tracking software for measuring real-time cognitive competition, broadening accessibility for researchers across disciplines. His cumulative body of work has substantially shaped contemporary understanding of how humans navigate increasingly robot-populated social environments.