Lab Photo, Fall 2023. From left to right: Joseph Outa, Sally Berson, Sholei Croom, Qiong Cao, Shari Liu, Di Liu, Tal Boger, Minjae Kim, Sam Maione
In the Look, Infer, and Understand (LIU) Lab at Johns Hopkins University, we are interested in how our minds and brains reason about the physical and social world.
We study the developmental origins of these abilities in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Lab for Child Development and Children Helping Science, and their neural origins in collaboration with the Krieger Kennedy Institute.
Our affiliations:
Origins in development
When we think about other people, we represent their actions as motivated by intentions and goals, as costly to execute, and as causing effects in the world. What are the representations and computations that support these intuitions, and how do they develop?
Origins in the brain
Understanding other people’s minds and actions depends on physical reasoning. What domain-specific and domain-general neural computations support our ability to reason about people’s actions, performed with a physical body in a physical world?
Recent Work
Erel et al. (2023, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science)
Liu, Lydic, Mei, & Saxe (2024, Imaging Neuroscience)