Neutral minus neutral: Liminal spaces as an uncanny phenomenon of unexplained human absence

Photographs of empty corridors and commercial facilities, known online as "liminal spaces," are judged uncanny by many online viewers. Because most theories of uncanniness locate its cause in the features of humans depicted in the photograph, the appreciation of images that contain no human or animal figures can be used to investigate whether this impression requires a depicted human or whether the expectation that people should be present is sufficient. In a previous empirical study of liminal images, images of rooms from which furniture, doors, and windows had been removed were rated as more than twice as uncanny as the corresponding typical rooms. The effect of human absence, however, has been examined only by replacing human figures with furniture of the same size. Each of four existing accounts, including the structural deviation account, which attributes the impression to deviation from a familiar configuration, explains, on its own, only part of the findings of that study. Here we propose a four-stage model in which uncanniness arises when an observer who judges a place to be in use cannot find a reason for the absence of people or objects that should be there. On the basis of the model, we specify five issues to be tested empirically on which the model and existing accounts make different predictions.