Hosted by the Department of History, an inaugural event of Mark's Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professorship

Abstract: We missed touching our friends, loved ones, and lovers during the COVID lockdowns, of course. The explosion in pet ownership is testament in part to the need to fulfil our tactile needs in other ways. So-called ‘slow’ (affective) touching, such as hugging, stroking, and grooming feels good and enhances social and emotional bonds, but is difficult to replicate through technology. There is increasing evidence of the role of affective touch in mitigating stress and maintaining homeostasis for the organism. On the other hand, ‘fast’ (discriminative) touch, which detects the surfaces and qualities of objects, has been researched for much longer, and has a history of replication through devices and machines. For affective or ‘slow’ touching, such behaviours have long been observed and written about in biology, ethology, social psychology, and nonverbal communication literature, for example, but only in recent decades have there been investigations into the underlying neuroscience in humans. In this talk I explore and contextualize the neuroscience behind affective or ‘slow’ social touching, how it operates across human and nonhuman species lines, and the possibilities for folding into future technologies. Artificial hands and e-skin are developing rapidly, and humanoid and animal-like (zoomorphic) robots are increasingly targeted to domestic and healthcare tasks. It is therefore opportune to ask about the role of pro-social touch within human-machine interactions, and their place in what some roboticists are starting to call Artificial Empathy (AE). The first part of this talk offers some history of neuroscience background about the gap in research between ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ touching, and the second part investigates the role of affective touching across human and nonhumans, including human and nonhuman robot forms.