Dr
Kata
Szita
Academic biography
Dr Kata Szita is an assistant professor of Multimedia at the School of Communications and a funded investigator at the Insight SFI Centre for Data Analytics. Her research focuses on extended reality experiences and how they affect human-to-computer and human-to-human interactions: she has published widely about the impacts of virtual environments and the use of avatars or XR-manipulated bodies on cognitive and neural processes, social behaviours, identity, as well as the dilemmas around the prevalence of artificial digital agents and personal data collected in XR spaces. Currently, she leads interdisciplinary and cross-sector research projects on accessible immersive technologies and user experiences in social virtual reality. As a collaborator, among other things, she is involved in studies of the cognitive processing of realism in mixed reality, virtual identities, and virtual youth behaviour.
Dr Szita’s research has been funded by, among others, EC Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, Meta Research, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has been involved in industry-based research collaborations as a user experience researcher and consultant with Volvo Cars, Sweden and Volograms, Ireland.
Dr Szita is associate editor for PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality (MIT Press), EDI committee member at Insight Centre, membership director, board member, and EDI committee member of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI), and member of INDCOR (Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations) funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology Action.
Research interests
Dr Szita's research involves the cognitive studies of immersive digital media technologies and she has published widely on user experiences and the cognitive and behavioural processes in terms of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, virtual reality, and the metaverse. Currently, she leads interdisciplinary and cross-sector research projects on accessible immersive technologies and user experiences in social virtual reality. As a collaborator, among other things, she is involved in studies of the cognitive processing of realism in mixed reality, virtual identities, and virtual youth behaviour. She is a funded investigator at the Insight SFI Centre for Data Analytics.
Her latest publications in venues like Perspectives on Psychological Science, the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Frontiers in Psychology, and the proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems report from empirical and theoretical studies of how users engage with media technologies, such as simulated (virtual reality) social spaces, volumetric video, and smartphones. Szita recently co-edited a special issue on immersive digital media for PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality (2023). She is a co-editor of a forthcoming book on the cinematic roots of VR technology and experiences by Amsterdam University Press (2025) and co-editor of a special issue on cognition of fictional stimuli for the Imagination, Cognition and Personality journal (2025).
Szita is frequently invited to present her resear