Team

Principle Investigator and Chair

Merle T. Fairhurst

Merle is a cognitive neuroscientist with strong interdisciplinary ties that facilitate crosstalk with engineers and philosophers. She studies the interaction between sensory signals that allow us to make sense of the world around us and to successfully interact with others. Her projects range from trying to understand what makes touch special to identifying factors that make interacting in a group different to interacting in pairs. As a classical singer, she is passionate about the special cases of sensory perception in music and art. And, as a mother of five, she strongly believes in promoting women in academia.

Expertise: Cognitive Neuroscientist
Research interest: How touch teaches our other senses to understand the world and others in it
Favourite touch experience: Loves to knead yeast dough

Post-Doc Researchers

Irene Valori

Irene has expertise in Developmental and Clinical Psychology. She completed her masters’ and doctoral studies at the University of Padova, Italy, delving into perceptual, motor, and cognitive aspects of humans’ interaction with virtual environments. Her previous work focused on the potential of VR to promote child development and support individuals with neurodevelopmental conditions such as Autism and ADHD. She joins the Chair of Acoustic and Haptic Engineering at the TU Dresden, and the Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI).

Irene is currently working on the Trust and Touch project, to investigate the role of affective touch in promoting interpersonal trust in technology-mediated human-to-human exchanges or human-machine interactions. Her research aims to explore individual differences in tactile emotional vocabulary (how do people use and perceive touch that conveys different emotional meanings?), with a focus on differences related to developmental trajectories, culture, and gender. https://ceti.one/irenevalori/

Expertise: Developmental psychologist
Research interest: How children touch objects and other people to learn about the external world and the self
Favourite touch experience: Loves to put her feet in the sand

Camille Sallaberry

Camille is a social roboticist with a strong interest in the complexification of (social) interaction happening during human-robot and human-mediated communication. His research focuses on asymmetric access to social information in mediated communication, specifically applied to avatar robots as mediators and to the sense of touch. Camille also participated in a transdisciplinary project to design and develop innovative, co-created robotic solutions for which he promoted human-robot teaming and semi-autonomous capabilities as well as a further development of people’s robotics knowledge.

His current project investigates people’s feeling of Co-Presence during a remote interaction and its variation influenced by the type of media used and its communication settings.

Expertise: Remote Social Touch and Avatar Mediated Interaction
Research Interest : How to access our Senses through a robot avatar and how much not accessing those senses impacts our social experience
Favourite touch experience: Petting his dog

Ph.D. Students

Benjamin Rieger

Ben is a Neurophilosopher, Audiotechnician, Music producer and Concert Organizer based in Munich who is an external PhD Student at the TU Dresden. Music and the communities surrounding it has always played an important role in his life and his passion for philosophy and science has led him to study philosophy at the LMU Munich and pursue interdisciplinary projects in the field of neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology. Combining neuroscience, music and philosophy for his PhD integrates his biggest passions and interests with one another.

After researching the universality of lullabies through their universal tempo range, Benjamin currently examines the relationship between lullabies, affective touch and arousal by investigating the coupling mechanisms of the two behaviours and researching the similar procession through bio- and neurofeedback. Studying the dynamics of singing and touch tempo in live settings will be insightful for understanding these behaviours and developing new therapeutic approaches in the future.

Expertise: Philosophy of Mind, Neurophilosophy, Neuroscience of Music, Musicproduction and Composition, Bioethics
Research Interest: Affective Touch, Lullabies and Sleep Music, Evolution of Musical Behaviour, Cooperation and Altruism, Deception and Self-Deception, Trauma and Depression Therapy
Favourite Touch Experience: A really warm welcoming hug

Louise Staring

Louise holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology from the Free University of Brussels, where she recently started her doctoral training. She specialised in biological psychology during her master’s degree and has since gained clinical experience in the field of youth mental healthcare. Thus, she is very interested in the intersection between biological and developmental psychology. In her master’s thesis, she studied how a 4-week daily gentle stroking touch intervention improved infant psychophysiological stress-regulation and resilience, which has driven her to further investigate the underlying mechanisms of parental affective touch.

Sensitouch: Funded by the Research Foundation Flanders, Louise is investigating how infants’ sensitivity to affective touch develops in early life, and how that is shaped by their developmental context in a longitudinal study where she studies mothers, fathers/partners, and infants. Also, with the future goal of detecting infants’ sensitivity to affective touch in an accessible and clinically relevant manner, she is studying whether infants can visually distinguish affective from non-affective touch, and if so, what underlying mechanisms are at play.

Expertise: Clinical psychology
Research Interest: how our early life experiences and interactions shape who we become
Favourite touch experience: the feeling of soft, freshly laundered bedsheets after a hot shower

Verena Zierer

Verena holds a Master of Science degree in clinical psychology from the University of the Armed Forces in Munich. In her master's thesis, Verena conducted a captivating exploration titled Touch Aversion in Different Contexts, a study that involved subclinical patients. Her research was dedicated to unraveling the intricacies of how individuals respond to affective touch in various situations, and illuminated the intricate interplay between psychological factors and the perception of touch, providing invaluable insights into the domain of affective processing and its influence on human behavior.

This master's thesis marked the inception of her Ph.D. project, which centers on the evolution of touch medicine as a therapeutic avenue for individuals with touch aversions, with a particular emphasis on patients diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In her ongoing research, she aspires to pioneer innovative therapeutic approaches that harness the therapeutic potential of touch to improve the overall well-being and quality of life for individuals with touch aversions, especially within the context of ASD.

Expertise: Clinical Psychology, Biopsychology, ASD
Research Interest: affective touch, neuropsychology, neuroendocrinology, psychoendocrinology, ASD, touch medicine, touch in clinical therapy
Favourite touch experience: Gently stroking the exceptionally soft fur behind a cats' ear

Francesco Rizzi

Francesco a Ph.D. student in Contemporary Art History at the University of Parma where he works on the relationship between art and technology. His research explores immersive experiences, the historical development of Virtual Reality (VR) devices and their artistic applications. My research also examines the psychological and physiological effects of immersive technologies, including their role in social interactions and sensory experiences. He has participated in several research projects, including collaborations with the University of Padua on social inclusion and affective touch, and he is currently a visiting researcher at the Technische Universität Dresden.

Expertise: Immersive technologies such as developing projects in VR, Unity 3D and C#
Research interests: Evolution of immersive experiences, the artistic use of VR, and the perception of digital environments
Favourite touch experience: Sun's rays caressing me by the sea

Research Assistants

Wenhan Sun

Wenhan is currently a PhD student at LMU Munich and has a multidisciplinary background. He has conducted many touch-related and fun experiments the last few years, such as integrating haptic stimuli to online experiments, simulating affective touch in VR. He is very passionate about the relatively underlooked sense of touch, and hopes to contribute in both understanding touch and integrating it in other technologies.

Touch and Trust: Wenhan is working on a project in which affective touch is simulated in VR. The project integrates this technology to control the contexts in which people perceive touch, and aims to establish the potential use of other devices to simulate human touch. This opens the door to an amazing world of digital / human-machine interaction.

Expertise: Analysing behavioural and physiological data, creating experiments
Research Interest: How we perceive and utilise touch, as well as how our bodies react to touch
Favourite touch experience: Violin vibrating gracefully under my fingers

Yasemin Abra

Yasemin has a BSc in biology and an MSc in neuro-cognitive psychology from LMU Munich. Her acting experience has allowed her to implement practices in theatre to her research, where she used the Mirror Game exercise to investigate coordination dynamics as a function of expertise and wrote her thesis at the NEVIA Lab on interpersonal synchrony and autism-like traits. She is a scholar of the Neuropsychoanalysis Association and is studying under Prof. Mark Solms.

The Effect of Expertise in Creative Coordination in Groups Using a Novel Zoom-based Mirror Game: Humans coordinate in groups not only for functional purposes, but to achieve greater creative potential. Although the dynamics underpinning creative coordination have received attention in recent years, no previous research has investigated the effect of expertise on how we interact within a group. In this study, we investigate how coordination and complexity of movement in a Zoom-based Mirror Game are influenced by expertise, and how this combination affects the way we feel about others.

Expertise: Social coordination dynamics
Research Interest: Dance and Movement Therapy, microphenomenology
Favourite touch experience: Playing with brown sugar

Pınar Ekin

Pınar majored in psychology and completed her master's in Cognitive Neuroscience at Freie Universität Berlin. She worked as a research assistant at Freie Universität and Weizenbaum Institute and also completed an internship at an addiction clinic in Ankara. She developed an interest in psychopathologies with somatic components, emotional self-other distinction, and the role of the skin as both a barrier and a bridge in interpersonal connection. She wrote her master’s dissertation in KatLab at UCL, London, focusing on the interplay of alexithymia, altercentric bias, and eating disorder symptoms utilizing spectral dynamic causal modeling with resting state fMRI data.

Expertise: Cognitive Neuroscience
Research Interest: psychopathologies, subjective experience, clinical neuroscience, continental philosophy, and neuropsychoanalysis
Favourite touch experience: molding clay

Jasmin Merkel

Jasmin holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and plans to pursue her Masters in clinical psychology. Her interests include the developmental and clinical implications of early tactile experiences and how social touch can facilitate connection and synchrony between humans.

Expertise: Psychology
Research Interest: The role of touch in early human development, interpersonal synchrony
Favourite touch experience: comforting back strokes and massages

Giulia Anilia Gambaretti

Giulia is studying Neuroscience and neuropsychological rehabilitation at the University of Padua.

Expertise: Neuroscience
Research interest: Interpersonal synchrony and neuro-imaging techniques
Favourite touch experience: immerse my fingers into the waves

Nicola Visentin

Nicola has a BSc in Cognitive Psychology and Psychobiology, and is currently attending the Master's course in Applied Cognitive Psychology in Padua.

VEIIO x Social Affective Touch: Nicola is currently working on a project involving the development of an AI-powered t-shirt that can help during the performance of physical exercise by implementing a vibrative haptic feedback to correct people's posture. The goal is to help people facing the ever-growing problem of lower back pain, connected to bad posture, by developing a system that they can trust, just like they would do with a human physiotherapist.

Expertise: Cyberpsychology
Research Interest: How technology influence and shape human behaviour and experience
Favourite touch experience: The light and soothing flick of pages under your finger

Master's Students

Helene Krämer

Helene completed her B.Sc. in Psychology at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and is currently in her fourth semester of the M.Sc. in Psychology (Human Performance in Socio-Technical Systems) at TU Dresden. During her Master's degree, she focused on human-machine interactions and how technology can be designed so that people can work efficiently with it. She completed her internships in the clinical field and in suicide prevention for young people, and is currently writing her thesis at the Chair of Social Affective Touch on the topic of touch in virtual reality, with a special focus on in-group/out-group dynamics.

Expertise: Psychology
Research Interest: How touch is perceived in virtual reality and how it can influence our behaviour
Favourite touch experience: Stroking her dog

Laura Baccaro

Laura has a Bachelor's degree in Psychological Sciences and Techniques and in Imaging and Radiotherapy Techniques. She is currently attending the Master's Course in Neuroscience and Neuropsychological Rehabilitation at the University of Padua. She also spent a period of study in South Korea and in Norway. Laura is passionate about Research and She is interested in exploring the field of human-human and human-machine relationship.

Expertise: Psychology, Neuroscience, Imaging Techniques
Research Interests: Neuroimaging Techniques, VR, human-human and human-machine relationship.
Favourite touch experience: Firm handshakes

Marco Ganio Mego

After earning his bachelor's degree in Psychology at UNIMORE, he is currently completing his master's in Neuroscience and Neuropsychological Rehabilitation at UNIPD, and investigating how touch in virtual reality affects social dynamics.

Expertise: Neuroscience, Cognitive psychology
Research interest: Social touch
Favorite touch experience: the sensation of softly caressing moss

Former Students and Research Assistants

Giovanna Furlan

Giovanna has a BSc in Psychological Science and broad interest in the reasons underlying social media excessive use. After a year with us, she left for a new adventure and will start a Master's degree at UCL, London.

Expertise: Psychology
Research Interest: The role of touch in social media excessive use, and how haptic feedbacks redirect users attention
Favourite touch experience: Playing with Noctiluca Scintillans, a bioluminescent algae that sparkles when the water around it is touched

Juliette Fairhurst

Juliette is bachelor's student at Heidelberg University studying computational linguistics and classical philology.

Expertise: Computational Linguistics
Research Interest: How different people experience touch and how to use touch to make people feel more at ease
Favourite touch experience: Petting kittens