As a couple of commenters have touched on, it seems like the experiment may be trying to test the wrong thing. The key to the uncanny valley doesn’t lie in the image, or the robot, or the animation – it’s the subversion of the viewer’s expectations. Our discomfort isn’t that the robot’s eyes are dead-looking, it’s that we expect them to look alive, and they don’t. The phenomenon occurs when the item exists in a context where those expectations are raised and then dashed. This is why it’s more commonly associated with near- (but un-)realistic renderings like The Polar Express, but it can still occur with non-realistic renderings like the test dummy in Monsters, Inc…
It’s such a commonly-understood response that in more extreme renderings, it forms the basis for a lot of horror movie cliches – the dog that’s really an alien, anything with creepy kids, etc.
