These electronic articles are posted for individual, non-commercial use to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly work. Downloading a document should be considered a request by you for a single copy. Peer-reviewed conference proceedings, that subsequently grew into journal articles, are indicated under the reference for the journal article. Representative papers are highlighted in pink.
The ManyBabies 5 Team (accepted, Stage 1 Registered Report). ManyBabies 5: A large-scale investigation of the proposed shift from familiarity preference to novelty preference in infant looking time. Nature Human Behaviour.
Liu, S., Karakose-Akbiyik, S., Outa, J., & Kim, M. (under review). How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world.
Older working version 1: Liu, S. (preprint). From infancy, we model people as minds, acting in a physical world.
Older working version 2: Liu, S., Outa, J., & Karakose-Akbiyik, S. (preprint). Naive psychology depends on naive physics.
Liu, S. & Outa, J. (2025). Putting it together: Interactions between domains of cognition. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Pre-conference workshop. [website]
Cao, A., Cao, Q., Frank, M. C., & Liu, S. (2025). Individual differences in habituation predict dishabituation magnitude in adults and infants. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Accepted as a talk and full paper. [github]
Cao, Q., Cao, A., Raz, G., Tenenbaum, J., & Liu, S. (2025). Surprise isn’t symmetrical: Adults’ looking suggests non-perceptual considerations during dishabituation. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Accepted as a poster and full paper. [OSF]
Outa, J., & Liu, S. (2025). Adults hold two parallel causal frameworks for reasoning about people's minds, actions, and bodies. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Accepted as a poster and full paper. [github]
Kunin, L., Piccolo, S., Saxe, R., & Liu, S. (2024). Perceptual and conceptual novelty independently guide infant looking behaviour: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Nature Human Behaviour. [OSF] [Supplement]
Raz, G., Piccolo, S. H., Medrano, J. A., Liu, S., Lydic, K., Mei, C., Ngyuen, V., Shu, T., & Saxe, R. (2024). An asynchronous, automated workflow for looking time experiments with infants. Developmental Psychology. [OSF] [Supplement]
Woo, B. M., Liu, S., Gweon, H., & Spelke, E. S. (2024). Toddlers prefer agents who help those facing harder tasks. Open Mind, 8, 483–499. [OSF] [Supplement]
Liu, S., Lydic, K., Mei, J., & Saxe, R. (2024). Violations of physical and psychological expectations in the human adult brain. Imaging Neuroscience, 2, 1-25. [OSF] [Supplement] [OpenNeuro]
Grew from this conference paper: Liu, S., Lydic, K., Mei, J., & Saxe, R. (2023). Violations of physical and psychological expectations in the human adult brain. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Woo, B. M., Liu, S., & Spelke, E. S. (2023). Infants rationally infer the goals of other people’s reaches in the absence of first-person experience with reaching actions. Developmental Science, e13453. [OSF]
Grew from this conference paper: Woo, B. M., Liu, S., & Spelke, E. (2021). Open-minded, not naïve: Three-month-old infants encode objects as the goals of other people’s reaches. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Liu, S., & Almeida, M. (2023). Knowing before doing: Review and mega-analysis of action understanding in prereaching infants. Psychological Bulletin, 149(5-6), 294–310. [OSF] [Supplement]
Liu, S., Raz, G., Kamps, F. K., Grossmann, T., & Saxe, R. (2023). No evidence for discontinuity between infants and adults. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
This paper was a response to: Blumberg, M. S., & Adolph, K. E. (2023). Protracted development of motor cortex constrains rich interpretations of infant cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
See also, response from Aslin et al: Aslin, R. N., Fox, N. A., Lewkowicz, D. J., Maurer, D., Nelson, C. A., & von Hofsten, C. (2023). Multiple pathways to developmental continuity in infant cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
See also, response to both responses from B&A: Blumberg, M. S., & Adolph, K. E. (2023). Infant action and cognition: what’s at stake? Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Erel, Y., Adams Shannon, K., Scott, K., Cao, P., Tan, X., Hart, P., Kline Struhl, M., Chu, J., Raz, G., Piccolo, S., Mei, C., Potter, C., Jaffe-Dax, S., Lew-Williams, C., Tenenbaum, J., Fairchild, K., Bermano, A., & Liu, S. (2023). iCatcher+: Robust and automated annotation of infants’ and young children’s gaze direction from videos collected in laboratory, field, and online studies. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Sciences, 6(2), 1-23. [OSF] [github] [poster]
Liu, S., Pepe, B., Ganesh Kumar, M., Ullman, T. D., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Spelke, E. S. (2022). Dangerous ground: One-year-old infants are sensitive to peril in other agents’ action plans. Open Mind, 6, 211-231. [OSF] [Supplement]
Gjata, N. N., Ullman, T. D., Spelke, E. S., & Liu, S. (2022). What could go wrong: Adults and children calibrate predictions and explanations of others' actions based on relative reward and danger. Cognitive Science, 46(7), e13163. [OSF] [Supplement]
Grew from this conference paper: Gjata, N. N., Ullman, T. D., Spelke, E. S., & Liu, S. (2020). Look before you leap: Quantitative tradeoffs between peril and reward in action understanding. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Chuey, A., Asaba, M., Bridgers, S., Carrillo, B., Dietz, G., Garcia, T., Leonard, J. A., Liu, S., Merrick, M., Radwan, S., Stegal, J., Velez, N., Woo, B., Wu, Y., Zhou, X. J., Frank, M. C., & Gweon, H. (2021). Moderated online data-collection for developmental research: Methods and replications. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 4968. [OSF] [Supplement]
Shu, T., Bhandwaldar, A., Gan, C., Smith, K. A., Liu, S., Gutfreund, D., Spelke, E., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Ullman, T. D. (2021). AGENT: A benchmark for core psychological reasoning. Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). [Project site]
Liu, S., Cushman, F. A., Gershman, S. J., Kool, W., & Spelke, E. S. (2019). Hard choices: Children’s understanding of the cost of action selection. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Liu, S., McCoy, J. P., & Ullman, T. D. (2019). People’s perceptions of others’ risk preferences. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Liu, S., Brooks, N. B. & Spelke, E. S. (2019). Origins of the concepts cause, cost, and goal in prereaching infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116 (36), 17747-17752. [OSF] [Supplement]
Liu, S., Gonzalez, G., & Warneken, F. (2018). Worth the wait: Children trade off delay and reward in self- and other-benefiting decisions. Developmental Science, e12702. [OSF] [Supplement]
Liu, S., Ullman, T. D., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Spelke, E. S. (2017). Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions. Science, 358(6366), 1038- 1041. [OSF] [Supplement]
Grew from this conference paper: Liu, S., Ullman, T. D., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Spelke, E. S. (2017). What’s worth the effort: Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Liu, S., & Spelke, E. S. (2017). Six-month-old infants expect agents to minimize the cost of their actions. Cognition, 160, 35-42. [OSF] [Supplement]
Parkinson, C., Liu, S., & Wheatley, T. (2014). A common cortical metric for spatial, temporal, and social distance. The Journal of Neuroscience, 34(5), 1979-1987.