Nobuko Katayama

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About

Nobuko Katayama is a developmental psychologist whose research explores the intersection of human cognition, biological motion perception, and children’s understanding of robots. Her work investigates how infants and adults perceive possible and impossible body movements, revealing the early development of action perception and the constraints of human anatomy. In her most cited study, *Infant and adult perceptions of possible and impossible body movements: An eye-tracking study* (2012, 35 citations), she demonstrated that even infants show sensitivity to biomechanical impossibilities, offering key insights into the origins of body schema. Katayama also examines how young children conceptualize robots, as shown in *Young Children’s Folk Knowledge of Robots* (2010, 15 citations), where she used card-choice tasks to reveal that five- and six-year-olds hold nuanced, often biological, assumptions about robotic agents. Her earlier work, *Development of Perception of Human and Robot Body Movement* (2010), compared infant eye-tracking responses to human versus humanoid robot movements, contributing to the growing field of developmental human-robot interaction. Through her careful, comparative approach, Katayama bridges developmental psychology and robotics, offering foundational knowledge on how humans perceive animate and inanimate agents from infancy through childhood.