Overview
PsyFuture is the Department of Excellence (2023–2027) project awarded by the Italian Ministry of Universities and Research (MUR) to the Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca. The goal is to build a research ecosystem that combines tight experimental control with strong ecological validity to study human behaviour and social interaction in both real and digital contexts.
What this grant funds
- Open Science & FAIR infrastructure
Upgrades to departmental infrastructure to support FAIR data and accelerate research on behavioural and psychophysiological correlates of real/virtual interpersonal relationships. - BiHOME laboratory
A large, multi-functional space for studying behaviour and relationships in realistic, presence-rich environments. - BiConnect platform
A digital platform for creating controlled, richly detailed multi-user social environments, enabling interaction studies with participants inside and outside the university.
Why it matters
PsyFuture creates, for the first time in Italy, an integrated pipeline to study social behaviour end-to-end—from high-control experiments to lifelike real and virtual settings—so results are both rigorous and relevant beyond the lab.
BiConnect’s role
BiConnect was initially launched thanks to this grant. With PsyFuture support, BiConnect develops and maintains a platform to design, run, and analyze multi-participant human-AI studies in realistic social scenarios (e.g., collaboration, conflict, persuasion) that span in-lab, remote, and hybrid setups. This allows our community to test interventions, compare real vs. virtual dynamics, and scale studies to larger, more diverse samples.
Programme & host
- Programme: Departments of Excellence, MUR (Italy)
- Project: PsyFuture — a research ecosystem for the life of the future
- Host: Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca
- Grant period: 2023–2027