Shari Liu
Assistant Professor
Contact Information
Research Interests: cognitive development, cognitive neuroscience, infant cognition, social cognition
Education: Ph.D., Harvard University
In the Look, Infer, and Understand (LIU) Lab, we are interested in how our minds and brains reason about the physical and social world. We study the developmental and neural origins of these abilities, using behavioral studies with babies and young children, neuroimaging studies with adults, meta-analyses aggregating results from prior research, and computational models.
Our lab values include: (i) scientific rigor and transparency (ii) community in our lab environment and (iii) increasing diversity in science.
AS.200.132 Introduction to Developmental Psychology
How does a newborn’s mind become an adult’s mind, like yours? This course will introduce students to the foundational theories and research on how children’s minds, brains, and behaviors develop, from birth through adolescence. Students will actively engage with a broad range of topics, from learning language to theory of mind, and consider the implications of what they learn for real-world issues like education, parenting, and policymaking.
AS.200.328 Methods for studying infant minds
When babies look out into the world, what do they see and understand: shapes and colors, people and objects, or mental and physical states? These questions have motivated work in psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence since the founding of these fields - but how do we go about answering them? In this seminar, we will read primary research articles from the field of infant cognitive development. We will engage with the hypotheses, methods, and inferences of this work, and learn about the strengths and limitations of the methods we have to answer these questions. We will also learn about open science tools that make our work more robust and likely to produce true answers, and use them to propose and plan novel research. This course is intended for upper-level undergraduate students.