Shari Liu

About

Shari Liu, PhD, is the Lab Director at LIULab at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on understanding how humans perceive and make sense of scenes involving people in motion by appealing to the underlying causes of these actions. She studies how individuals appreciate that others have mental lives, including desires, percepts, and beliefs, while also understanding that people are physical bodies capable of exerting forces and navigating through the physical world. Her work explores how minds and brains derive meaning from sensory input and how this knowledge develops over time. Dr. Liu is committed to advancing open science principles, emphasizing transparency, reproducibility, and inclusivity in research. She is dedicated to providing high-quality mentorship to students from diverse backgrounds, drawing from her own experience as a first-generation immigrant to the United States who found her way into science through supportive mentorship and personal development.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Developmental psychology
• World Wide Web
• Data science
• Neuroscience
• Applied psychology
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• Infants rationally infer the goals of other people's reaches in the absence of first‐person experience with reaching actions

  Developmental Science · 2023-11-05 · 28 citations

  articleOpen access

  Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants' first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others' actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not see others' reaches as goal-directed. In five experiments (N = 117), we test an alternative hypothesis: Young infants view reaching as undertaken for a p…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Violations of physical and psychological expectations in the human adult brain

  Imaging Neuroscience · 2024-01-04 · 22 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  After seeing one solid object apparently passing through another, or a person taking the long route to a destination when a shortcut was available, human adults classify those events as surprising. When tested on these events in violation-of-expectation (VOE) experiments, infants look longer at the same outcomes, relative to similar but expected outcomes. What cognitive processes underlie these judgments from adults, and perhaps infants' sustained attention to these events? As one approach to te…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Toddlers Prefer Agents Who Help Those Facing Harder Tasks

  Open Mind · 2024-01-01 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Capacities to understand and evaluate others’ actions are fundamental to human social life. Infants and toddlers are sensitive to the costs of others’ actions, infer others’ values from the costs of the actions they take, and prefer those who help others to those who hinder them, but it is largely unknown whether and how cost considerations inform early understanding of third-party prosocial actions. In three experiments (N = 94), we asked whether 16-month-old toddlers value agents who…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An asynchronous, hands-off workflow for looking time experiments with infants.

  Developmental Psychology · 2024-06-24 · 8 citations

  article

  The study of infant gaze has long been a key tool for understanding the developing mind. However, labor-intensive data collection and processing limit the speed at which this understanding can be advanced. Here, we demonstrate an asynchronous workflow for conducting violation-of-expectation (VoE) experiments, which is fully "hands-off" for the experimenter. We first replicate four classic VoE experiments in a synchronous online setting, and show that VoE can generate highly replicable effects th…

  PublisherDOI

• Naive psychology depends on naive physics

  2024-03-18 · 8 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How do humans make sense of other people: entities who are simultaneously psychological beings and physical objects? Across the cognitive sciences, including psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and neuroscience, scholars have puzzled over the origins and structure of our understanding of the physical world on the one hand, and the psychological world on the other. Each of these research areas has accumulated evidence that these two domains of thought are independent, modular systems. We disagr…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Neural foundations of learning, reasoning, and surprise in human infants

  NIH · $189k · 2020–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Elizabeth S. Spelke

  Harvard University

  57 shared

• Rebecca Saxe

  Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences

  46 shared

• Tomer Ullman

  Harvard University

  39 shared

• Kirsten Lydic

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  33 shared

• Joshua B. Tenenbaum

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  32 shared

• Gal Raz

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  24 shared

• Catherine Mei

  Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences

  15 shared

• Sabrina Hsiao-Ling Piccolo

  Northeastern University

  15 shared

Labs

• LIULab @ JHUPI

Education

• Ph.D. in Psychology, Psychology

  Harvard University

  2020

• A.B. in Psychology, Psychology and Brain Sciences

  Dartmouth College

  2014

Similar researchers at Johns Hopkins University

• Richard Huganirh-210
• Michela Gallagherh-104
• Patricia Janakh-88