Eight years ago, PARO, a therapeutical robot developed by Takanori Shibata, began to be sold commercially. PARO has the appearance of a seal but also presenting characteristics of human babies. It has been used with dementia patients in Japan, Italy or Germany. In an experimental study, half of the dementia patients that interacted with PARO improved their brain activity. PARO can successfully create affective bonds with people. PARO is the best proof that for humans is easier to interact with robots different from what we experience. Humans feel uncomfortably interacting with mechanical objects very similar or that cannot be distinguished from themselves. Psychology uses toys in therapy and we can create artificial seals and project upon them the feelings that we ascribe to real seals. But being ascribed a property and having it are not the same thing. The uncanny hypothesis holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes revulsion among human observers. This is an interesting lesson for the development in robotics of the imitation myth because people interact better with a robot that does not provoke expectations of how it should behave.
