Katja Sangati

Cognitive Scientist | JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at RIKEN

Bio

I’m a cognitive scientist studying the mechanisms of adaptivity — how individuals and collectives respond to disruption, reorganize, and sometimes even flourish.

Drawing from enactivism, complex systems theory, and my own lived experience, I investigate adaptive processes across scales: from post-traumatic growth in individuals to coordination dynamics in human and human-AI collectives.

My current work explores collective reward learning in human groups.

Research areas

Embodied cognition, collective behavior, joint action, mechanistic explanation.

Methods

Conceptual analysis, formal modeling, behavioral experiments.

Positions

JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow, RIKEN, Tokyo (since Jan 2025)
Computational Group Dynamics Unit

Postdoctoral Scholar, OIST, Okinawa (2023–2024)
Neural Computation Unit

Postdoctoral Scholar, OIST, Okinawa (2020–2023)
Embodied Cognitive Science Unit

PhD in Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen (2012–2019)
Dissertation on enactive mechanisms of joint action.

Symbolism

The ouroboros featured on this site represents collective self-maintenance — the way a set of small, individual elements can collectively organize to maintain a stable whole. This is a central theme of my research on adaptivity and enactivism.