Sotaro Kita
@sotarokita.bsky.social
51 followers 42 following 19 posts
Born and raised in Japan. Lived in the US, and the Netherlands. Now, I am teaching psychology in a British university. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/psych/people/skita/skita
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sotarokita.bsky.social
Our paper describing a new video corpus of infant-parent interaction, which researchers can freely access from Databrary. 44 dyads of shared book reading sessions, captured by three cameras: head-mounted cameras on the infant and the parent, and an overview camera. tinyurl.com/yzs38uwz
Reposted by Sotaro Kita
mrgbcn.bsky.social
👋 PhD opportunities for African women in STEM 👩‍🎓. Check it out 👀, distribute 📨, and get in touch ✍️with us www.upf.edu/web/mrg if interested. www.upf.edu/web/phd-engi...
PhD in Information and Communication Technologies - Dorcas Muthoni PhD Fellowship
www.upf.edu
Reposted by Sotaro Kita
profsimonfisher.bsky.social
Extraordinary resource! "Comprehensive recordings from 621,733 neurons in 297 brain areas of 139 mice (12 labs) performing a decision-making task with sensory, motor & cognitive components: a public dataset to understand how computations distributed across & within brain areas drive behaviour."👇🧪
A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature
The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...
www.nature.com
sotarokita.bsky.social
Our new paper about the second international conference on research culture at Univ. of Warwick, IRCC2024, with 250 in-person and 250 on-line participants. Find out what themes were discussed. tinyurl.com/2m43yty3 And, IRCC2025 tinyurl.com/y9jexub7 will be on 17-Sept-2025.
‘One Year On’: Reflections on the International Research Culture Conference 2024 (IRCC24) | Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal
tinyurl.com
sotarokita.bsky.social
Our paper on the vision of the National Centre for Research Culture at the University of Warwick, which we founded in 2023. It aims to coordinate sector-wide effort to improve research culture, making our universities optimal places for researchers and research excellence. tinyurl.com/y4yuvx8p
The National Centre for Research Culture at the University of Warwick: Vision and current activities | Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal
tinyurl.com
sotarokita.bsky.social
Our article on a groundbreaking positive action programme for Black researchers at the University of Warwick, the Warwick PATHWAY programme, which we developed. It provides undergraduate research bursary, PhD studentship and postdoc fellowships, also creates a community. tinyurl.com/23tyep92
Warwick PATHWAY Programme: A positive action programme to facilitate Black researchers’ careers | Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal
tinyurl.com
Reposted by Sotaro Kita
teruniahamat.bsky.social
🌟Deeply honoured to have been selected as the 1st-Place Winner in the Interdisciplinary category of the Warwick Open Research Awards 2025, for my open-approach work on infants’ comprehension of pointing gestures 👶👉
Excited to keep pushing for open, rigorous, and collaborative science!💡🔍 #OpenScience
sotarokita.bsky.social
Fantastic news. Congratulations.
Reposted by Sotaro Kita
suzanneaussems.bsky.social
Very grateful to the organisers for pulling off such a wonderful three days. We had a great time at #ISGS10 @isgs2025.bsky.social and are already looking forward to ISGS11 in Hong Kong!
sotarokita.bsky.social
We analzyed to what extent gestures have "crisp" vs. "sloppy" handshapes. Crips handshapes indicate a discrete (finite) set of handshapes used in the communication system.
These figures show three gesture handshapes. (a) shows an index finger pointing handshape and (c) shows a similar handshape but with both index and middle fingers extended. (b) is an intermediate handshape, where the index finger is fully extended but the middle finger is only partially extended. Figure 1. Examples of canonical (crisp) handshapes (a, c), in which fingers are clearly selected or unselected, and an intermediate (sloppy) handshape (b), in which some fingers (in this example the middle finger) are somewhere between selected and unselected. (a) canonical (crisp) (b) intermediate (sloppy) (c) canonical (crisp)
sotarokita.bsky.social
Our paper tinyurl.com/4upbjayy showed children can create foundations of phonetics and phonology: discreteness of form units and duality of patterning. We analyzed handshapes in homesign (gesture by deaf children without linguistic input) and mothers' co-speech gesture.
Deaf homesigners can create the foundations of phonetics and phonology without an adult linguistic model
Children who are exposed to minimal linguistic input can nevertheless introduce linguistic features into their communication systems at the level of m…
tinyurl.com
sotarokita.bsky.social
I think, I had to flip left and right of the photo, so that the hand points to the opening side of the book. (The original photo, where the finger points to left, did not look quite right as a book cover).
Reposted by Sotaro Kita
lmatyjek.bsky.social
Autistic and neurotypical adults use different neural mechanisms to integrate AV speech, but benefit equally in word recognition 🧠

📜New paper in Autism Research (OA):📜
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... w/
@mrgbcn.bsky.social, @sotarokita.bsky.social, & @mireiatorralba.bsky.social 🙏
Paper_summary
Reposted by Sotaro Kita
warwickpsych.bsky.social
@sotarokita.bsky.social, along with Marie Sams and Rika Nair, reflects on the International Research Culture Conference 2024 and looks ahead to this year’s conference: wrap.warwick.ac.uk/i...
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sotarokita.bsky.social
And, I took the photograph!
sotarokita.bsky.social
Our new paper on our ability to judge iconicity (similarity) between information in different modalities. People interpret iconicity in speech and hand gesture using the same general-purpose modality‑independent process. <https://tinyurl.com/2y3775nf>
stimulus videos
sotarokita.bsky.social
I just posted summaries of my publications in 2024-2025. You can read more about me at warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/psyc...
Personal Home Page
warwick.ac.uk
sotarokita.bsky.social
I am a psychologist and linguist at the University of Warwick @uni-of-warwick.bsky.social. I am interested in the role of gesture in communication and thinking, the role of iconicity in language, and language development. I am also interested in how to improve research culture.
warwick.ac.uk
sotarokita.bsky.social
A new paper by Rika Nair and me about why we founded an international research culture conference. exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/ex.... In the proceedings of International Research Culture Conference 2023 (held at the University of Warwick). @exchangesjournal.bsky.social
Why Do We Need an International Research Culture Conference? : Lessons from IRCC23 and future directions | Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal
exchanges.warwick.ac.uk
sotarokita.bsky.social
Our new paper on seeds of language-like generativity in bird vocal communication. Pied babblers can interpret a novel sequence of calls in a compositional way, just as humans can understand a sentence we have never heard before. <https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rspb.2024.0922>
sotarokita.bsky.social

Our new paper by my PhD student Kirsty Green
@KirstGreen on iconic gestures produced by infants. Infants are not just imitating their parent's gestures, but they often use interactional materials from preceding contexts to create iconic gestures. tinyurl.com/5n8afnjc