Mind o̶v̶e̶r̶ Matter? (with Shari Liu)

In this episode, we were joined by none other than the inimitable Dr. Shari Liu. We chatted with Shari about her recent paper in Nature Reviews Psychology entitled How Physical Information Is Used to Make Sense of the Psychological World.

In both the paper and the episode, Shari makes the case that infants and children make sense of other people's minds by considering the physical world in which those minds are embedded. Shari argues that this is achieved via two separate, but interacting, domain-specific systems: naive physics and naive psychology. Along the way, Deon and Jenny pepper Shari with questions about how her account differs from other nativist approaches to cognitive development and whether various "deflationary" findings pose challenges for the existence of these systems, but Shari handles them with great aplomb.

Links

Liu, S., Karakose-Akbiyik, S., Outa, J., & Kim, M. J. (2026). How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world. Nature Reviews Psychology, 5(1), 59–73. Link