Publications

Electronic versions of our articles are provided to ensure timely dissemination of academic work. They can be downloaded for noncommercial purposes. Copyright resides with the respective copyright holders as stated in each article. The files may not be reposted without permission from copyright holders.

Bold = key empirical or theory paper

Preprints and Manuscripts Under Review

Guerrero*, M.J., Smith-Flores*, A.S. & Powell, L.J. (under review). Examining gender differences in children's reasoning about empathy. https://osf.io/preprints/osf/w5pcj_v1 *joint first authors
Qi, W., Wang, B., & Powell, L.J. (in prep). The joint evolution of theory of mind and reciprocity in noisy games.
Marin, A., Fearns, Z., Dratva, M., Powell, L.J., Störmer, V.S., & Carver, L.J. (in prep). Infants anticipate the timing of sounds from dynamic collision events.
Powell, L.J. (2020). Robust and automated motion correction for real infant fNIRS data. psyarxiv.com/yxcnb/

2025 & In Press

Powell, L.J. & Tompkins, R. (in press). Relational models are too elaborate for basic social relationship reasoning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. (Commentary on target article by Ashley Thomas).
Qi, W., Vul, E. & Powell, L.J. (2025). An accurate and efficient measure of welfare tradeoff ratios. PLoS One, 20, e0322410.
Pepe, B., Woo, B.M., Thomas, A.J. & Powell, L.J. (2025). Helping and hindering guide infants' expectations about future behavior. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. https://osf.io/preprints/osf/jgsc4_v1
Tompkins, R. & Powell, L.J. (2025). Early evaluations of caregivers who help and hinder safe and dangerous goals. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/b4gna_v2
Hennessy, V., Spelke, E.S. & Powell, L.J. (2025). Infants' recognition of social conventions. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ufkcp_v1
Jiang, K., Smith-Flores, A.S., Liang, K., Ong, D.C. & Powell, L.J. (2025). Vicarious emotion predictions integrate information about relationship strength. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. https://osf.io/preprints/osf/9myxe_v1
Smith-Flores, A.S., Bonamy, G.J. & Powell, L.J. (2025). Children's evaluations of empathizers. Child Development. https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.14242
Pepe, B. & Powell, L.J. (2025). Infants' expectations for prosociality in imitators. Infancy, 30, e12642. osf.io/preprints/osf/cjnkb
Lucca, K., Yuen, F., Wang, Y.,... & Hamlin, J.K. (2025). Infants' social evaluation of helpers and hinderers: a large-scale, multi-lab, coordinated replication study. Developmental Science, 28, e13581.

2024

Smith-Flores, A.S., Herrera-Guevara, I.A., & Powell, L.J. (2024). Infants expect friends, but not rivals, to be happy for each other when they succeed. Developmental Science, 1, e13423. PDF
Powell, L.J. & Winkielman, P. (2024). Watching others mirror: Explaining the range of third-party inferences from imitation. In O. Genschow & E. Cracco (Eds.), Automatic Imitation. Open Access Link

2023

Smith-Flores, A.S., Bonamy, G.J., & Powell, L.J. (2023). Children's reasoning about empathy and social relationships. Open Mind, 7, 837-854. PDF
Smith-Flores, A.S. & Powell, L.J. (2023). Joint reasoning about social affiliation and emotion. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2, 374-383. PDF
Pesowski, M.L. & Powell, L.J. (2023). Ownership as privileged utility. Cognitive Development, 66, 101321. PDF
Pesowski, M.L., Powell, L.J., Cikara, M. & Schachner, A. (2023). Interpersonal utility and children's social inferences from shared preferences. Cognition, 232, 105344. PDF

2022

Schuwerk, T., Kampis, D., Baillargeon, R., Biro, S., ...Powell, L.J., ...Frank, M.C., & Rakoczy, H. (Stage 1 Registered Report). Action anticipation based on an agent’s epistemic state in toddlers and adults. Child Development. PDF
Qi, W., Vul, E., Schachner, A. & Powell, L.J. (2022). Triadic "conflict" primitives can be reduced to welfare tradeoff ratios. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. (Commentary on target article by David Pietraszewski). PDF
Powell, L.J. (2022). Adopted utility calculus: Origins of a concept of social affiliation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17, 1215-1233. PDF

2021

Powell, L.J. (2021). Individual differences provide new insight into infant looking. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25, 925-926. PDF
Richardson, H., Taylor, J., Kane-Grade, F., Powell, L., Bosquet Enlow, M., & Nelson, C.A. (2021). Preferential responses to faces in superior temporal and medial prefrontal cortex in three-year-old children. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. PDF

2020 & Prior

Shah, A.M., Grotzinger, H., Kaczmarzyk, J.R., Powell, L.J., Yücel, M.A., Gabrieli, J.D. & Hubbard, N.A. (2020). Fixed and flexible: Dynamic prefrontal activations and working memory capacity relationships vary with memory demand. Cognitive Neuroscience, 11, 175-180. PDF
Powell, L.J. (2019). Imitation: Neither instinct nor gadget, but a cultural starting point? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 42. (Commentary on Précis of Cognitive Gadgets, by Cecilia Heyes). PDF
Powell, L.J. & Spelke, E.S. (2018). Third party preferences for imitators in preverbal infants. Open Mind, 2, 61-71 PDF
Poulin-Dubois, D., Rakoczy, H., Burnside, K., Crivello, C., Dörrenberg, S., Edwards, K., Krist, H., Kulke, L., Liszkowski, U., Low, J., Perner, J., Powell, L., Priewasser, B., Rafetseder, E. & Ruffman, T. (2018). Do infants understand false beliefs? We don’t know yet - a commentary on Baillargeon, Buttelmann and Southgate’s commentary. Cognitive Development, 48, 302-315. PDF
Powell, L.J., Kosakowski, H.L. & Saxe, R. (2018). Social origins of cortical face areas. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22, 752-763. PDF
Powell, L.J., Hobbs, K., Bardis, A., Carey, S. & Saxe, R. (2018). Replication of implicit theory of mind tasks with varying representational demands. Cognitive Development, 46, 40-50. PDF
Powell, L.J., Deen, B. & Saxe, R. (2018). Using individual functional channels of interest to study cortical development with fNIRS. Developmental Science, 21, e12595. PDF
Powell, L.J. & Spelke, E.S. (2018). Human infants’ understanding of social imitation: Inferences of affiliation from third party observations. Cognition, 170, 31-48. PDF
Powell, L.J. & Carey, S. (2017). Executive function depletion and its impact on theory of mind. Cognition, 164, 150-162. PDF
Bascandziev, I., Powell, L.J., Harris, P. & Carey, S. (2016). A role for executive functions in explanatory understanding of the physical world. Cognitive Development, 29, 71-85. PDF
Powell, L.J. & Spelke, E.S. (2013). Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110, E3965-E3972. PDF
Skerry, A.E., Lambert, E., Powell, L.J., & McAuliffe, K. (2013). The origins of pedagogy: Developmental and evolutionary perspectives. Evolutionary Psychology, 11, 550-573. PDF
Powell, L.J., Macrae, C.N., Cloutier, J., Metcalfe, J., & Mitchell, J.P. (2009). Dissociable neural substrates for agentic versus conceptual representations of self. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22, 2186-2197. PDF
Saxe, R., Jamal, N., & Powell, L. (2006). My body or yours? The effect of visual perspective on cortical body representations. Cerebral Cortex, 16, 178-182. PDF
Saxe, R. & Powell, L.J. (2006). It’s the thought that counts: specific brain regions for one component of theory of mind. Psychological Science, 17, 692-699. PDF

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