In October and November, I had the privilege of returning to Waseda University in Tokyo for an extended research stay as part of the CULSHY project, led by Katharina Rohlfing and Kazuki Sekine. This collaboration focuses on advancing cross-cultural studies of children’s multimodal communicative behavior, including in interactions with social robots.

During this stay, we concentrated on data collection for the study to deepen insights into how cultural contexts shape children’s interactional patterns. This work is a vital step in understanding and comparing nonverbal communication across diverse cultural settings.