Arvid Guterstam receives the Swedish Society for Medical Research (SSMF) Starting Grant 2025
KI researcher Arvid Guterstam at the Division of pshychology receives the SSMF Starting Grant 2025 for the project "Artificial sensory modality for tactile perception others’ attention: A novel intervention for improving social cognition in autism?". The grant amounts to six million SEK over five years.
Arvid Guterstam leads the Social Perception Lab (socialperceptionlab.com) at the Division of Psychology, Department of Clinical Neuroscience. He studies fundamental aspects of how our brains perceive other people's mental states, and how these social systems differ in individuals with neuropsychiatric conditions associated with social challenges, such as autism.
Arvid Guterstam explains what the support from SSMF means for his continued research: "The support from SSMF is of great significance for my continued research. It makes it possible for me and my team to launch an exciting new high-risk project. We will make use of new basic knowledge about the social brain to develop an innovative clinical intervention. In short, we will create a new ‘social sensory modality’ in the form of a haptic suit that allows the user to physically feel others’ gaze as a touch to the skin. We will test the hypothesis that this new sense will stimulate certain social brain circuits and boost the user’s intuitive sense of others’ attention. In this way, we hope to be able to improve social cognition in clinical populations with challenges in this domain, such as in autism." says Arvid Guterstam.