Electronic versions 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.
Preprints and Manuscripts Under Review
Pepe, B. & Powell, L.J. (in prep). Children use others’ costly helping to make rapid inferences about their future behavior.
Guerrero, M.J., Smith-Flores, A.S. & Powell, L.J. (under review). Examining the role of gender in children’s reasoning about empathy.
Qi, W., Wang, B. & Powell, L.J. (in prep). Finding friends: 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. https://psyarxiv.com/yxcnb/
Papers
Powell, L.J. & Tompkins, R. (in press). Relational models are too elaborate for basic social relationship reasoning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Pepe, B., Woo, B.M., Thomas, A.J. & Powell, L.J. (accepted). 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. (accepted). 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/b4gna_v2
Hennessy, V., Spelke, E.S. & Powell, L.J. (accepted). Infants recognize 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. (accepted). Vicarious emotion predictions integrate information about relationship strength. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/9myxe_v1
Qi, W., Vul, E., & Powell, L.J. (2025). An accurate and efficient measure of welfare tradeoff ratios. PLoS One, 20(5), e0322410.
Smith-Flores, A.S., Bonamy, G., & Powell, L.J. (in press). Children’s evaluations of empathizers. Child Development.
Pepe, B. & Powell, L.J. (2025). Infants’ expectation of helping in imitators. Infancy, 30, e12642. preprint
Lucca, K., Yuen, F., Wang, Y., …Powell, L.J.,… Zimmer, L., & Hamlin, J.K. (2025). Infants’ social evaluation of helpers and hinderers: A large-scale, multi-lab, coordinated replication study. Developmental Science, 28, e13581.
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, pp. 333-351.
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, 27, e13423. https://psyarxiv.com/8gmw3/
Smith-Flores, A.S., Bonamy, G.J. & Powell, L.J. (2023). Children’s reasoning about empathy and social relationships. Open Mind, 7, 837-854.
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. https://psyarxiv.com/4z8sf
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. https://psyarxiv.com/x4jbm
Powell, L.J. (2022). Adopted utility calculus: Origins of a concept of social affiliation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17, 1215-1233. https://psyarxiv.com/kuwgf/
Qi, W., Vul, E., Schachner, A. & Powell, L.J. (2022). Triadic “conflict” primitives can be reduced to welfare tradeoff ratios. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. PDF
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, 50, 100984. Open access link
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 in 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 Data
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
Open File Drawer
See explainer here.
Garcia, M.C., Smith-Flores, A.S., Pesowski, M.L., Schachner, A., & Powell, L.J. Characterizing infants' understanding of ownership and ownership rights. PDF OSF (Prereg, Materials, Data, Code)
Pepe, B. & Powell, L.J. Infants' understanding of conformity and status. PDF OSF (Prereg, Materials, Data, Code)
Powell, L.J. & Spelke, E.S. (2017, September 30). The role of perceptual access in infants’ third party evaluation of imitation. https://psyarxiv.com/63tyq/