Abstract: I’m interested in how people communicate through the sense of touch, and how haptic information transfer interacts with perception in other modalities. I’ll discuss two very different kinds of haptic communication that my group has been studying recently. The first is *abstract* information, delivered one-way to your hand encoded in complex vibrations. We’ve found that humans are better at this than you might expect – depending on how the sensations are created; and the medium has potential for low-effort, background communication. In the second kind, we’re examining haptically communicated *affect*: what’s behind feels that we like or don’t like – can this be predicted or quantified? How do we communicate emotion haptically, to people or animals, and is this an essential part of emotional communication more generally? We’re building a highly sensed animatronic Creature as an experimental platform, which we plan to use for basic study and in a therapeutic setting.
- This event has passed.