Shari Liu

Cognitive scientist
Shari Liu is principal investigator at Johns Hopkins. She studies how we understand other people’s minds and actions, focusing on their origins in development and their origins in the human brain.

Why you should listen

Together with her collaborators, Shari Liu has discovered that babies can learn what other people want from how hard they try (see here) and that babies who are too young to reach for objects nevertheless can make sense of other people’s reaching actions (see here). Liu obtained her PhD from Harvard University in 2020. She is the recipient of the Goethals Teaching Prize (2019) from Harvard University and the Glushko Dissertation Prize (2021) from the Cognitive Science Society.

Shari Liu’s TED talk