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.
Representative papers are indicated in bold. Peer-reviewed conference proceedings, that subsequently grew into journal articles, are indicated in the conference paper citation.
Preprints
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. (in press, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Sciences). iCatcher+: Robust and automated annotation of infants’ and young children’s gaze direction from videos collected in laboratory, field, and online studies. [OSF] [github] [poster]
Liu, S., & Almeida, M. (under revision). Knowing before doing: Review and mega-analysis of action understanding in prereaching infants. [OSF]
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]
Liu, S. (under review). From infancy, we model people as minds, acting in a physical world.
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 (submitted). ManyBabies 5: A large-scale investigation of the proposed shift from familiarity preference to novelty preference in infant looking time.
Liu, S., Lydic, K., Mei, J., & Saxe, R. (preprint). Domain-specific and domain-general neural responses to surprising psychological and physical events.
Journal articles and peer-reviewed conference proceedings
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]
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]
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. (See Woo et al., under revision)
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. (See Gjata et al., 2022)
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. doi:10.1073/pnas.1904410116 [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. doi:10.1111/desc.12702 [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. doi:10.1126/science.aag2132 [OSF] [Supplement]
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. (See Liu et al., 2017, Science)
Liu, S., & Spelke, E. S. (2017). Six-month-old infants expect agents to minimize the cost of their actions. Cognition, 160, 35-42. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.007 [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. doi:10.1523/jneurosci.2159-13.2014