Between Cyberplace and Cyberspace: the researcher's role in virtual setting research.

Disciplines such as Internet Research, the Psychology of Cyberspace and the Social Psychology of Cyberplaces call for an epistemological reflection not merely on the universe of objects they deal with, but also, and perhaps especially, on the research settings used to investigate them. With this work, we intend to make a contribution to the debate on three issues: psychosocial interpretation of the new environments, the "mediated" nature of the researcher-setting-study object relationship, and cyberplaces as settings for mediated interaction research.

Interweaving interactions in virtual worlds: a case study.

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of playing the online game World of Warcraft (WoW), both on adolescent's (effective) social interaction and on the competence they developed on it. Social interactions within the game environment have been investigated by integrating qualitative and quantitative methods: conversation analysis and social network analysis (SNA). From a psychosocial point of view, the in-game interactions, and in particular conversational exchanges, turn out to be a collaborative path of the joint definition of identities and social ties, with reflection on in-game processes and out-game relationship.

Intersubjectivity as a possible way to inhabit future cyberplaces.

A change of perspective in online interaction research, shifts attention from technologies to what people actually do online. It's time to study how subjects interact with others and how they 'take possession' of virtual environments on a perceptive, emotional and relational plan. This paper illustrates: a) how actors 'construct' themselves as subjects facing others during online interactions; b) the relationships actors establish with virtual environments and how actors transform 'simple' cyberspaces in cyberplaces; c) how actors - on the basis of a) and b) - 'bridge the gap' between them and their interlocutors using communication as a tool to give form to intersubjectivity, intended as an effective relational structure. A research program built around these three issues - both on the theoretical and empirical plan - should become the core of Social Psychology of Cyberplaces as this paper will demonstrate.

Presence is just an illusion: using fMRI to locate the brain area responsible to the meaning given to places.

Researchers have suggested different models to describe the feeling of presence. Most of them imply that presence is some kind of alternate state. Research conducted in our research team lead us to consider presence simply like a very powerful perceptual illusion, with the addition of challenging the meaning given to the place where the user actually is (i.e., being "there"). The aim of this study is to investigate the neural correlates of the illusion of presence in VR. Five right-handed adults were scanned in the fMRI and were immersed in two conditions: high and low presence, where the exact same stimulus was presented to participants during each condition but the context (narrative) provided differed significantly. Results show a clear, specific and statistically significant involvement of the parahippocampal area, the brain responsible for giving contextual meaning of places.

The co-definition of self: conversations in virtual reality.

Conversation analysis can take the form of a qualitative methodology for the exploration of discursive productions, whose main goal is the formulation of hypotheses for reading psychosocial interaction through descriptive models of interlocution. Therefore, in this study, conversations in a shared Virtual Environment have been analyzed in order to understand the specific structure, dynamics, and phenomenology of Virtual Reality effects on the "interactive micro-chains" that constitute the communicative thread of daily experience.