Comforting Social Touch — Individual Differences and Cognitive-Scientific Understanding

Being touched by another — stroking, gentle contact, or a handshake — gives us a strong sense of comfort and security. Yet the neural and cognitive mechanisms that underlie this pleasantness, and the origins of individual differences in how it is felt, remain largely unclear.

This project combines psychophysics, neuroscience measurement, and computational modeling to systematically clarify the affective value generated by social touch and its individual differences. Drawing on affective human-robot interaction via touch, we build computational frameworks based on active inference and generative models, and aim at a foundation that allows robots to adaptively respond to individual tactile preferences.