For thirty years, my research has pursued one question across successive technologies: how do digital

environments become part of the conditions that shape human experience, cognition, and behaviour? 

I addressed this first through virtual reality and mediated presence, then through the Digital We, Positive Technology and digital well-being, and now through System 0, the adaptive AI layer that structures evidence before judgement.

1. CYBERPSYCHOLOGY AS A RESEARCH FIELD. Since the early 1990s, I have combined theory, experimentation, and research infrastructure to help establish cyberpsychology as a field within psychological science. I co-founded the annual CyberPsychology, CyberTherapy & Social Networking Conference and continue to serve as chair and coordinator; I also co-founded and serve as European Editor of Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. These activities helped build the international research community in which the psychological study of emerging technologies became a sustained scientific field.

2. PRESENCE AND POSITIVE TECHNOLOGY. A second line of work asked how mediated environments become psychologically effective. I developed presence theory by linking the experience of “being there” to cognitive, sensorimotor, and neuropsychological processes, informing both basic research and therapeutic VR. In parallel, I introduced Positive Technology, examining how digital environments can structure, augment, or replace aspects of experience to support well-being and growth. Together, these programmes established a core approach: explaining how properties of a technological environment become properties of psychological experience.

3. BODILY IDENTITY AND DIGITALLY MEDIATED SELF-EXPERIENCE. A third line of work tested how digital environments alter internal representations of the self. Building on my Body Matrix framework, I examined how social-media environments affect the multisensory integration underlying bodily identity.  The Disembodied Disconnect Hypothesis extended this approach to social cohesion, while recent VR experiments showed that Instagram and beauty-filter exposure can alter susceptibility to embodiment illusions. This programme has a key strategy: making otherwise invisible digital mediation measurable through behavioural, embodied, and metacognitive signatures.

4. A HUMAN APPROACH TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:  My current work extends this trajectory to artificial intelligence, asking how adaptive digital systems influence the conditions under which humans think, decide, and act. I introduced the concept of System 0 to describe AI as an external cognitive layer that can organize information, anticipate relevance, and shape evidence before reflective judgement occurs. In parallel, the notion of Psychomatics examines the psychological and behavioural processes emerging from the interaction between human minds and intelligent technologies. By comparing human cognition with AI architectures, this programme reframes artificial intelligence not only as a tool, but as a new environment for cognition, agency, and responsibility.

2008

2007

2006

Before 2006 (selected publications)