Sonia
Rábago
Studying how conversational AI and technological mediation reshape human experience, self-understanding, introspection, and the conditions of meaning — at the intersection of psychology, phenomenology, and the emerging human–AI encounter.
A humanistic
inquiry into mind,
mediation, and AI
My research begins with a fundamental question: what happens to the human subject
when inner speech becomes mediated by artificial systems?
I work at the intersection of empirical psychology and
humanistic inquiry — combining research on conversational
agents with phenomenological attention to experience, selfhood, and symbolic mediation.
My central concern is not what AI does technically, but what it does to the
human being as a meaning-making, self-interpreting, historically situated subject.
Five constellations
animating the work
How does sustained dialogue with artificial systems alter the way humans perceive, narrate, and understand themselves? What new forms of self-relation emerge in the human–AI encounter?
Can the process of thinking become observable? How does externalizing inner speech through AI dialogue make metacognition visible — and what does this reveal about cognition itself?
Empirical investigation of the effectiveness and mechanisms of AI chatbots in mental health contexts — including a current meta-analysis on conversational agents and depressive symptoms.
How do technological artifacts function as symbolic mediators of experience? Following a Vygotskian and hermeneutic tradition, I study AI as a new form of cultural tool that transforms human capacities.
What happens to the horizon of human possibility in technologically saturated environments? How is the experience of time, agency, and meaning transformed when AI collapses the distance between present and future?
An observatory
of the research world
This constellation explores how symbolic and technological environments reshape the horizon of human possibility.
Click or tap a node to explore. Nodes are connected not by argument but by resonance.
Three registers
of the same inquiry
A researcher
at the edge of disciplines
I am Sonia Rábago, an emerging researcher with formal training in psychology and a strong orientation toward humanistic and philosophical inquiry. I am completing a Master's degree in Applied Psychology Research in Spain, where my empirical work focuses on conversational AI and mental health.
My intellectual trajectory brings together psychology, phenomenology, hermeneutics, philosophical anthropology, and human–AI interaction research. What connects these is a single sustained question: how do technological environments — and conversational AI in particular — transform the human being as a meaning-making, self-interpreting, historically situated subject?
I am not only interested in what AI does functionally. I am interested in what it does to interiority — to the texture of thought, the structure of self-understanding, the sense of possibility, and the conditions under which a person can still encounter themselves.
doctoral opportunities, and collaborations
at the intersection of mind, culture, and AI.