Shari Liu

If you're heading to @cogscisociety.bsky.social, come to our symposium “Perception as a Foundation for Common‑Sense Theories of the World”

📅 August 1 • 9 AM
📍 Salon 2

With
@thiskevinsmith.bsky.social
@shariliu.bsky.social
@judithfan.bsky.social
@ardeeb.bsky.social
— See you there! #CogSci2025

Presentation list for language and cognition lab at CogSci 2025.

Looking forward to #cogsci2025 next week - here's a list of presentations from my lab!

The Causality in Cognition Lab is pumped for #cogsci2025 💪

Poster that feature talks from the Thomas Lab at the Cognitive Science Society. The Thomas Lab at CogSci 2025 July 31st Brandon woo Social Engagement Leads Infants to Represent People as Individuals Oral Talk Session: Development of Social Cognition 1 Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Location: Salon 6 Denise Lopez Flores Preliminary Evidence that Infants and Children Use Accents to Inform Relational Expectations Poster Session 1: (PL1-L-118) Time: 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM Location: Salon 8 Friday August 1st Emma Yu Children Expect Emotional Consolation to Occur in Close Relationships Oral Talk Session: Development of Social Cognition 2 Time: 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM Location: Nob Hill B Min Feldman Do children use action frequency to infer social closeness? Poster Session 2: (P2-F-55) Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Location: Salon 8 Christina Steele Navigating Family Ties: Young Children's Cognitive Representations of the Family Network Oral Talk Session: Learning and Development 3 Time: 4:00PM - 5:30PM Location: Nob Hill D Hannah Hok Kim Written in Stone: Lay intuitions about the emergence and impact of formal rules Poster Session 2: (P2-H-77) Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Location: Salon 8 Saturday August 2 Lizette Pizza Do People Value Plants Over Non-Living Entities? Moral Considerations in Adults and Young Children Poster Session 3: (P3-P-158) Time: 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM Location: Salon 8 Megan Richardson Children's Expectations of Emotional Intimacy in Close Relationships Poster Session 3: (P3-R-165) Time: 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM Location: Salon 8 Mack Briscoe When to speak up: How children reason about group dynamics Poster Session 3: (P3-B-18) Time: 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM Location: Salon 8

Come see my lab at the Cognitive Science Society Conference #cogsci2025

A list of the SoCal Lab's presentations at CogSci. In brief: Lindsey Powell is giving talks in Workshop 1 on July 30 at 9:30 am and in Symposium 1 on July 31. Tori Hennessy is giving a talk in the Development of Social Cognition 1 session on July 31. Bill Pepe is giving a talk in the Development of Social Cognition session on August 1. Coxi Jiang is giving a talk in the Emotion session on August 1. Rodney Tompkins is presenting a poster in Session 2 on August 1.

The SoCal Lab is headed to #cogsci2025 this week! Here's where you can find us:

Schedule for the LIU LAB at CogSci 2025 conference, featuring a variety of workshops and presentations. Wednesday, July 30 Workshop 1: "Putting it together: Interactions between domains of cognition" at 8:30 AM, presented by Shari Liu and Joseph Outa. Thursday, July 31 P1-C-24: "Surprise isn’t symmetrical: Adults’ looking suggests non-perceptual considerations during dishabituation" from 1:00 PM to 2:15 PM, presented by Qiong Cao, Anjie Cao, Gal Raz, Josh Tenenbaum, and Shari Liu. Friday, August 1 Lecture in Symposium 4: "Perceiving and reasoning jointly about the social and physical world" at 9:40 AM, presented by Shari Liu. P2-O-146: "Adults hold two parallel causal frameworks for reasoning about people’s minds, actions, and bodies" from 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM, presented by Joseph Outa and Shari Liu. Saturday, August 2 P3-B-15: "Who drew this? Children appreciate visual style differently than adults" from 1:00 PM to 2:15 PM, presented by Tal Boger, Chaz Firestone, and Shari Liu. P3-K-95: "Pushing people: the neural basis of social interaction perception" from 1:00 PM to 2:15 PM, presented by Minjae Kim, Miriam Hauptman, and Shari Liu. Talks 49: "Learning and Development 5" from 3:21 PM to 3:45 PM, presenting findings on individual differences in habituation and dishabituation, by Anjie Cao, Qiong Cao, Michael Frank, and Shari Liu. The schedule includes a call to attendees to "Come and say hi!" at the event.

Who's excited for #CogSci2025? 💭

Lucy! Congratulations 🎈🎉🎊

The Onion NYT ad. The headline of the editorial says “CONGRESS, NOW MORE THAN EVER OUR NATION NEEDS YOUR COWARDICE”

EXCLUSIVE — The Onion has a full-page ad in today’s NYT featuring part of an editorial calling out congressional fecklessness towards Trump. They also sent a copy of their latest issue to every lawmaker.

My report, with an excerpt from the full editorial: www.thehandbasket.co/p/exclusive-...

🔆 I'm hiring! 🔆

There are two open positions:

1. Summer research position (best for master's or graduate student); focus on computational social cognition.
2. Postdoc (currently interviewing!); focus on computational social cognition and AI safety.

sites.google.com/corp/site/sy...

BREAKING: A federal judge in Massachusetts (the Reagan-appointed William Young) has declared the Trump administration's cuts to NIH grants — ostensibly over Trump's EOs on gender ideology and DEI — are "illegal" and "void." He's ordering many grants restored.

Flyer for a "No Tyrants" protest in London, UK

when you want to join the fun but can't quite get down with the nomenclature (ht @davelevitan.bsky.social)

The neighborhood is getting ready for tomorrow

NIH APPLICANTS:

Your application will be WITHDRAWN BEFORE REVIEW if you have an international collaboration and do not include a Foreign Justification.

Normally this could be provided after review as JIT but NOT ANYMORE.

You have been warned.

Is it true you use only 10 bits / s of your brain?
@andpru.bsky.social and I provide a motor systems perspective on a proposed speed limit for human information processing. Out today in
@natneuro.nature.com:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

No Kings On June 14—Flag Day—Donald Trump wants tanks in the street and a made-for-TV display of dominance for his birthday. A spectacle meant to look like strength. But real power isn’t staged in Washington. ...

Find your closest rally on Saturday and go. You can tell your kids where you were on the other side of this. Outnumber him everywhere.

www.nokings.org#map

NIH walks back ban on new grants for universities with DEI programs or Israel boycotts The NIH has rescinded a policy requiring recipients of new grants to certify they do not have unlawful DEI programs or boycotts of Israel.

New STAT story about NIH rescinding the institution-wide anti-DEI term and condition that had been added to Notices of Award.

www.statnews.com/2025/06/09/n...

1/n

I just signed the Bethesda Declaration and urge you to do the same today, so that we all stand with NIH researchers as Battacharya appears before the Senate Appropriations Committee tomorrow.

"My name is Greta Thunberg and I am from Sweden. If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces, or forces that support Israel."

Intersection of spatial and numerical cognition in the developing brain Abstract. Early mathematical development is thought to depend on visuospatial processing, yet neural evidence for this relationship in young children has b

So excited to see this paper with @ckaicher.bsky.social and @cantlonlab.bsky.social finally out!

Chimpanzees and children are curious about social interactions | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Curiosity is adaptive, enhances learning, and reduces uncertainty. Social curiosity is defined as the motivation to gain information about the actions, relationships, and psychology of others. Little ...

New paper just dropped🎉 With novel "Curiosity Boxes", we find that chimps & children are very curious about social interactions, & some even give up a reward to gain info! Fun collaboration with @alisongopnik.bsky.social, @janengelmann.bsky.social & others royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Learning a Novel Number System: The Role of Compositional Rules and Counting Procedures Humans count to indefinitely large numbers by recycling words from a finite list, and combining them using rules—for example, combining sixty with unit labels to generate sixty-one, sixty-two, and so...

Fun new paper led by Sebastian Holt, training adults on artificial number systems. Most work tests only base-10 learning; we trained adults on a range of base systems & manipulated whether numbers were learned as part of a counting system, or unordered words. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Now officially out with nice formatting and all 🥳 "Thinking clearly about age, period, and cohort effects" -- a gentle introduction to the age-period-cohort problem and how to "solve" it through various types of assumptions.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Super excited to share this paper! We show that lesions to parietal areas involved in skilled action disrupt processing of tools in the ventral stream. 1/8

I think a lot of people don't understand that in a world where everyone uses "AI" to vomit out statistically average text, the ability to use words uniquely becomes a premium skill and a critical differentiator.

Starting to look like I might not be able to work at Harvard anymore due to recent funding cuts. If you know of any open statistical consulting positions that support remote work or are NYC-based, please reach out! 😅

I love Maintenance Phase!

63% of American adults had unfavorable views of Martin Luther King Jr in August 1966, per Gallup surveys

46% of Mississippi GOP voters said interracial marriage should be illegal in a 2011 PPP poll

to push w/e is popular instead of trying to popularize justice is to admit you lack moral leadership

If you burn down a forest, you don't miss out on lumber for just that season. You have to replant all the trees, nurture them, and wait for them to grow.

The science and research budget cuts happening now are wanton, senseless arson. Recovery, if it ever happens, will take generations.

We just got an email that Hopkins is freezing salaries, hiring, and some construction projects. In addition to the 800 million USAID we lost, we’ve had another 50 million in grants canceled so far. And a 2/3 year over year decline in funded grants despite an increase in submissions