discussion of the uncanny, or how mannequins make me deeply uncomfortable

etymology

uncanny:  1590s: "mischievous;" 1773: in the sense of "associated with the supernatural," originally Scottish and northern English, from un- "not" + canny.  Canny is from the Anglo-Saxon root ken: “knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception: an idea beyond one's ken.” Thus the uncanny is something outside one's familiar knowledge or perceptions. 

uncanny valley 

Roboticist Masahiro Mori's developed the hypothesis of the "uncanny valley" to describe people’s reactions to simulacra or robots crafted to be as human-like as possible.  There is a relational gap we experience when viewing familiar living people and their inanimate representations, whether in two-d or fully dimensional. In Mori’s diagram, the valley represents human’s negative emotional responses when confronted with replicas that mimic well but not perfectly.  A person’s innate suspicion and revulsion are triggered by these counterfeit effigies whose likenesses are too keen but still strange. If an object is crafted to resemble human likeness our affinity with the object grows according to it’s resemblance, to a point.  Once the object reaches close approximation it begins to repel.  Mori’s hypothesis is indebted to the work of both Jentsch and Freud's essays on the uncanny.

Hypothesized emotional response of human subjects is plotted against anthropomorphism of a robot, following roboticist Masahiro Mori's theory of the uncanny. The uncanny valley is the region of negative emotional response towards robots that seem "almost human". Movement amplifies the emotional response.