The School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering and the Essex Brain-Computer Interfaces and Neural Engineering Lab is part of the the Horizon 2020 FET Open project “POTION: Promoting social interaction through emotional body odours”.

The project will start in January 2019 and includes partners from the Universities of Pisa (Italy), Padova (Italy), and Essex (UK), the Universitat Politecnica De Valencia (Spain), the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), and the Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), and three companies ISPA CRL (Portougal) , SRA Instruments (France) and Feel-Ing s.r.l. (Italy).

The Essex team’s work on the project focuses on the development of Bayesian (DCM and Active Inference) computational models of multimodal social interaction. These models will be applied to evaluate socially relevant variables, such as trust, presence and inclusion as well as generate optimal stimula in artificially mediated social interactions. In particular, the models will cover the role of human chemosignals perception in social interactions. The models will be identified using neurophysiological data (e.g. EEG), peripheral physiological activation (i.e., ECG, RESP, EDA) and behavioural changes (i.e., f-EMG) collected using VR scenarios of increasing complexity.