Preprint(s)

Woo, B. M., Tsang, A., & Hamlin, J. K. (under review). Eleven-month-old infants preferentially look at helpers but do not reliably incorporate inconsistency into their evaluations. []

In Press

Woo, B. M., Yu, E., Richardson, M., & Thomas, A. J. (in press). Developing intuitions that close friends know the contents of each other’s minds. Open Mind. [][OSF]

Woo, B. M., Laha, A., Chen, A., & Wolf, C. (in press). The study of early social evaluation: Contextualizing failures to replicate and looking forward. Open Mind. []

Woo, B. M., & Laha, A. (in press). Social connection and mental state reasoning. Commentary on Thomas’s “Cognitive representations of social relationships and their developmental origins”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

2025

Woo, B. M., Peng, H., Steele, C., & Thomas, A. J. (2025). Social engagement leads infants to represent people as individuals. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. []

Laha, A., & Woo, B. M. (2025). Young children spontaneously appreciate the perspectives of their social partners. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. []

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 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. []

2024

Woo, B. M., Liu, S., & Spelke, E. S. (2024). Infants rationally infer the goals of other people’s reaches in the absence of first-person experience with reaching actions. Developmental Science. [][OSF]

Woo, B. M., Chisholm, G. H., & Spelke, E. S. (2024). Do toddlers reason about other people’s experiences of objects? A limit to early mental state reasoning. Cognition. [][OSF]

Woo, B. M., Yu, E., & Thomas, A. J. (2024). Children expect people to accurately represent the minds of their close social partners. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. []

2023

Woo, B. M., & Spelke, E. S. (2023). Toddlers’ social evaluations of agents who act on false beliefs. Developmental Science. [][OSF]

Woo, B. M., & Spelke, E. S. (2023). Infants and toddlers leverage their understanding of action goals to evaluate agents who help others. Child Development. [][OSF]

Woo, B. M., Tan, E., Yuen, F. L., & Hamlin, J. K. (2023). Socially evaluative contexts facilitate mentalizing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27, 17-29. []

2022

Woo, B. M., Tan, E., & Hamlin, J. K. (2022). Human morality is based on an early-emergy moral core. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 4, 41-61. []

Thomas, A. J., Woo, B. M., Nettle, D., Spelke, E. S., & Saxe, R. (2022). Early concepts of intimacy: young humans use saliva sharing to infer close relationships. Science, 375, 311-315. [][OSF]

Woo, B. M., & Spelke, E. S. (2022). Eight-month-old infants’ social evaluations of agents who act on false beliefs. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. []

Woo, B. M., & Hamlin, J. K. (2022). Evidence for an early-emerging moral core. In M. Killen and J. Smetana (Eds.), Handbook of Moral Development.

Woo, B. M., & Hamlin, J. K. (2022). Origins of impression formation in infancy. In E. Balcetis and G. B. Moskowitz (Eds.), Handbook of Impression Formation.

2021

Woo, B. M., Tan, E., & Hamlin, J. K. (2021). Theory of mind in context: Mental state representations for social evaluation. Commentary on Phillips et al.’s “Knowledge before belief”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, E176. []

Woo, B. M., & Spelke, E. S. (2021). Limits to early mental state reasoning: Fourteen- to 15-month-old infants appreciate whether others can see objects, but not others’ experiences of objects. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [original proceedings , resulting paper ]

Woo, B. M., Liu, S., & Spelke, E. S. (2021). Open-minded, not naïve: Three-month-old infants encode objects as the goals of other people’s reaches. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [original proceedings , resulting paper ]

Chuey, A., … Woo, B. M., … Gweon, H. (2021). Moderated online data-collection for developmental research: methods and replications. Frontiers in Psychology. []

2017 to 2020

Woo, B. M., & Spelke, E. S. (2020). How to help best: Infants’ changing understanding of multistep action sequences informs their evaluations of helping. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [original proceedings , resulting paper ]

Woo, B. M., & Mitchell, J. P. (2020). Simulation: a strategy for mindreading similar but not dissimilar others? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. [][OSF]

Woo, B. M., & Schaller, M. (2020). “Parental” responses to human infants (and puppy dogs): Evidence that the perception of eyes is especially influential, but eye contact is not. PLoS ONE. []

Woo, B. M., Steckler, C. M., Le, D. T., & Hamlin, J. K. (2017). Social evaluation of intentional, truly accidental, and negligently accidental helpers and harmers by 10-month-old infants. Cognition, 168, 154-163. []

Steckler, C. M., Woo, B. M., & Hamlin, J. K. (2017). The limits of early social evaluation: 9-month-olds fail to generate social evaluations of individuals who behave inconsistently. Cognition, 167, 255-265. []