Publications
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 indicated in bold.
Preprints
Woo, B. M., Liu, S., Gweon, H., & Spelke, E. (accepted). Toddlers evaluate helpers based on the needs of their beneficiaries. Open Mind.
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.
Raz, G., Piccolo, S. H., Medrano, J. A., Liu, S., Lydic, K., Mei, C., Ngyuen, V., Shu, T., & Saxe, R. (under revision). An asynchronous, automated workflow for looking time experiments with infants.
Kunin, L., Piccolo, S., Saxe, R., & Liu, S. (under revision). Infant looking behaviour is guided independently by stimulus- and expectation-driven novelty: Evidence from a systematic meta-analysis. [OSF]
Liu, S., Outa, J., & Karakose-Akbiyik, S. (submitted). Naive psychology depends on naive physics.
Liu, S. (working paper). From infancy, we model people as minds, acting in a physical world.
Journal articles and peer-reviewed conference proceedings
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 the CogSci paper: Liu, S., Lydic, K., Mei, J., & Saxe, R. (2023). Violations of physical and psychological expectations in the human adult brain. Proceedings of the 45th 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 the CogSci 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 the CogSci 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 42nd 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 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). [Project site]
Journal articles and peer-reviewed conference proceedings (prior to 2020)
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 41st 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 41st 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 the CogSci 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 39th 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.