VGP Lab: Interactive Psychophysiology of Voluntarily Generated Chills

VGP Lab is an exploratory interactive psychophysiology system designed around an unusual experimental capability: voluntarily generated piloerection (VGP), in which a person can intentionally initiate the subjective chill/goosebump response without an external emotional stimulus.

The demo explores how deliberately generated chills can be captured as a temporally precise, repeatable human-state signal and synchronized with physiological, behavioral, and stimulus data. Rather than treating chills only as spontaneous responses to music or emotional events, VGP Lab uses intentional state transitions as experimental markers.

During a session, the system records explicit state annotations—including GENERATE, REST, and INHIBIT—alongside heart-rate data and precisely synchronized music/audio information. Audio can be represented through temporal, spectral, and stem-derived features, allowing subjective events, physiological changes, and stimulus structure to be inspected together on a common timeline. The distinction between passive rest and active inhibition is particularly important: the interface treats intentional suppression of an emerging response as a potentially different state rather than assuming that “not generating” is equivalent to baseline.

The current system should be understood as an N=1 exploratory instrumentation and visualization prototype, not as a validated VGP decoder or diagnostic system. Its purpose is to develop a rigorous interface and data structure for generating testable hypotheses and designing subsequent experiments incorporating modalities such as EEG and peripheral physiology.

Attendees will be able to explore synchronized sessions and see how voluntary state labels, physiological measurements, and stimulus features interact over time. The demo illustrates a broader HCI question relevant beyond VGP: how can highly controllable subjective states become useful experimental inputs for multimodal biosignal systems?

VGP Lab is particularly relevant to the workshop’s focus on brain/body signals, real-time biosignal systems, multimodal representation, and human-centered neurotechnology. Voluntary chills offer an unusual edge case for studying intentional autonomic-affective regulation because the state can be repeatedly initiated, interrupted, suppressed, and reported with unusually precise timing.

The longer-term goal is to use this framework to investigate whether multimodal physiological or neural models can distinguish intentional generation, active inhibition, spontaneous/externally elicited chills, and baseline states—and eventually to explore closed-loop neuroadaptive experiences driven by those distinctions.