Research
We investigate the natural origins of cognitive and cultural development, as well as cognitive, neuronal, and social mechanisms of change in infancy and childhood. In experimental and longitudinal approaches, we use interaction paradigms, measures of eye movements, and neurophysiological correlates, like pupil sizes and EEG recordings.
The research at our lab focuses on (selection); Complete list of publications
Communication-induced object expectations and object permanence
Mayer, M. & Liszkowski, U. (2023). Pupillometric Contributions to Deciphering Early Object Concepts: Object Permanence and Identity. Poster presented at the Jean Piaget Society, Madrid, Spain.
Pätzold, W. & Liszkowski, U. (2019). Pupillometry reveals communication‐induced object expectations in 12‐ but not 8‐months‐old infants. Developmental Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12832
Pätzold, W. & Liszkowski, U. (under review). Gamma-oscillations as a signature of object representations following occlusion and pointing events in 10- and 12-months-old infants.
Liszkowski, U., & Ramenzoni, V. C. (2015). Pointing to Nothing? Empty Places Prime Infants' Attention to Absent Objects. Infancy, 20(4), 433-444.
Comprehension of Acting & Theory of Mind (selection)
Karthik, S., Parise, E., & Liszkowski, U. (2022). Mirroring communicative actions: Contextual modulation of mu rhythm desynchronization in response to the ‘Back-of-hand’action in 9-month-old infants. Developmental Neuropsychology, 47(3), 158-174. https://doi.org/10.1080/87565641.2022.2055033
Dörrenberg, S., Rakoczy, H., & Liszkowski, U. (2018). How (not) to measure infant Theory of Mind: Testing the replicability and validity of four non-verbal measures. Cognitive Development. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.01.001
Haskaraca, F. N., Proft, M., Liszkowski, U., & Rakoczy, H. (2023). How robust are egocentric and altercentric interference effects in social cognition? a test with explicit and implicit versions of a continuous false belief task. Front. Psychol. 14. doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1142302
Cognitive and social origins of gestural communication in the first year of life
Rüther, J. & Liszkowski, U. (2023). Ontogeny of index-finger pointing. Journal of Child Language. 1-17. https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S0305000923000053
Liszkowski, U. & Rüther, J. (2021). Ontogenetic Origins of Infant Pointing. In: Lock, Sinha, Gontier (eds). Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution. Preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/nd694/
Liszkowski, U. (2018). Emergence of shared reference and shared minds in infancy. Current Opinion in Psychology, 23, 26-29.
Gestural communication of infants and apes
Goot, M. H., Tomasello, M., & Liszkowski, U. (2014). Differences in the nonverbal requests of great apes and human infants. Child Development, 85(2), 444-455.
Kersken, V., Gómez, J. C., Liszkowski, U., Soldati, A., & Hobaiter, C. (2018). A gestural repertoire of 1-to 2-year-old human children: in search of the ape gestures. Animal Cognition. 1-19.
Liszkowski, U., Schäfer, M., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Prelinguistic infants, but not chimpanzees, communicate about absent entities. Psychological Science, 20(5), 654-660.
Liszkowski, U. (2014). Two sources of meaning in infant communication: preceding action contexts and act-accompanying characteristics. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 369(1651), 20130294.
Ramenzoni, V. C., & Liszkowski, U. (2016). The social reach: 8-month-olds reach for unobtainable objects in the presence of another person. Psychological Science, 27(9), 1278-1285.
ManyBabies: Large-scale replication studies in co-operation with many international laboratories on findings of cognitive infant research. (Head: Michael Frank, Stanford University, USA; https://manybabies.github.io/
The ManyBabies1 Consortium (2020). Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed speech preference. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245919900809
Byers-Heinlein, K., Tsui, R.K., Renswoude, D. R. van, Black, A., Barr, R., Brown, A., Colomer, M., Durrant, S., Gampe, A., Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hay, J. F., Hernik, M., Jartó, M., Kovács, A. M., Laoun-Rubenstein, A., Lew-Williams, C., Liszkowski, U., Liu, L., Noble, C., Potter, C. E., Rocha-Hidalgo, J., Sebastian-Galles, N., Soderstrom, M., Visser, I., Waddell, C., Wermelinger, S., & Singh, L. (2021). Development of Gaze Following in Monolingual and Bilingual Infants: A Multi-Lab Study. Infancy, 26(1), 4-38.
Schuwerk, T., Kampis, D., (…Liszkowski, U...) Frank, M., Rakoczy, R. (accepted; Stage 1 Registered Report). Action anticipation based on an agent’s epistemic state in toddlers and adults. PsyArXiv Preprint