© <a href="https://www.vecteezy.com/free-photos/human-robot-touch">Human Robot Touch Stock photos by Vecteezy</a>

Social Affective Touch

learn more Social Affective Touch

What we do

multisensory © Merle Fairhurst
Multisens­ory

We live in a multisensory world where most of our thoughts, decisions and actions depend on how we make sense of the various sensory cues that we encounter. We are interested in better understanding how sensory information is integrated, prioritised and potentially digitised. In particular, we focus on how social touch experiences are tuned by our other senses. Check out a recent paper in Virtual Reality investigating the multisensory nature of affective touch.
multimodal approaches © Merle Fairhurst
Multimodal

How we feel and behave in rich and complex social scenarios is difficult to capture. From our two-person FNIRS-physiology lab to our bespoke Virtual Reality lab, we collect and model a combination of rich objective and subjective measures. By measuring dynamic changes at the level of behaviour, brain, physiology as well as self reports, we try to put the different pieces of the puzzle together to better understand how we experience social interactions both face-to-face or at a distance.
multiple agents hybrid © Merle Fairhurst
Multi-agent

We already share our lives with Alexa and Siri, driverless taxis and surgical robots. How we coordinate in these complex social groups and what role social touch plays to foster trust in technology is a central theme of our group. Coordinating our efforts with the CeTI excellence cluster, we use robots, virtual reality and novel haptic technologies to investigate how we will interact in the digital future with ever increasing group sizes (think orchestras and manufacturing teams).

contakt_logo1 © Merle Fairhurst

Home of the ConTakt Lab

What is in a name: ConTakt Lab

Con-        Used with certain words to add a notion similar to those conveyed by with, together, or joint

Takt -      German word indicating the division of a musical, especially a rhythmic sequence, into equal units

Tactus (uncountable noun): the sense of touch.

Tactus (feminine tacta, neuter tactum):

1. touched, having been touched, grasped, having been grasped

2. reached, having been reached, arrived at, having been arrived at

3. attained to, having been attained to moved, having been moved, affected, having been affected

The sense of touch represents the most direct and intimate channel of communication and a powerful means of connection between the self and the external world. In addition to the discriminative type of touch that we use to explore the physical characteristics of objects, the so-called affective touch is specifically dedicated to capturing the emotional nuances of bodily contacts with other people. This sensory channel is based on dedicated receptors and fibres in the skin, which are particularly sensitive to gentle caress-like stroking, and project to the social (emotional) areas of the brain. Affective touch also modulates physiological activity, having the power to reduce stress indices such as heart rate. However, it's not a simple sensory experience, and context is key to shape how people experience interpersonal touch. Social touch preferences and behaviours follow gender-specific, cultural, ideological and ethical social norms that influence how interpersonal touch is used and under which conditions is experienced as pleasant.