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., & Spelke, E. S. (under review). From abstract intentions to specific goals: Human infants’ understanding of actions they cannot perform. [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. 

• Woo, B. M., Liu, S., Gweon, H., & Spelke, E. (under review). Toddlers evaluate helpers based on the needs of their beneficiaries.

• The ManyBabies 5 Team (revision submitted). ManyBabies 5: A large-scale investigation of the proposed shift from familiarity preference to novelty preference in infant looking time.

• Kunin, L., Piccolo, S., Saxe, R., & Liu, S. (submitted). Conceptual and perceptual novelty reflect distinct motives of infant looking: Meta-analytic evidence. [OSF]

• Liu, S., Lydic, K., Mei, J., & Saxe, R. (submitted). Violations of physical and psychological expectations in the human adult brain. [OSF]

  • • 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.

• Liu, S. (preprint). From infancy, we model people as minds, acting in a physical world.

Journal articles and peer-reviewed conference proceedings

• Liu, S., & Almeida, M. (2023). Knowing before doing: Review and mega-analysis of action understanding in prereaching infants. Psychological Bulletin. [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.

Journal articles and peer-reviewed conference proceedings (prior to 2022)

• 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]

• 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.