About me

Welcome! I am Naomi Nota, a cognitive science postdoctoral researcher at the Central European University, where I investigate how social event construal shapes memory as part of the LISA project. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, studying how language prediction is affected under challenging conditions such as cognitive load, background noise, fast speech, and different accents. I completed my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Donders Centre for Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, where I examined how visual bodily signals contribute to language processing. I have also conducted research on sentence reading in bilingual children.

My research focuses on how people efficiently process language in real-world contexts, and how this is shaped by cognitive demands and available cues. I investigate mechanisms that support comprehension, including prediction, as well as situated language use involving social context and multimodal signals. Across this work, I have studied diverse populations (children, younger adults, and older adults with and without hearing impairment, across both first- and second-language contexts) using a range of methods, from analyses of conversation corpora to behavioural experiments employing virtual-avatar paradigms and eye-tracking. 

I enjoy teaching and science communication (through conferences, outreach, and blogs for MPI TalkLing), and work as a freelance illustrator in my spare time (see art sample). I am also the co-author of The Language of Time, an illustrated children's book on language and cosmology. Feel free to contact me about research, supervision opportunities, science communication or illustration projects!