About Me
Hi! I am a cognitive scientist using interdisciplinary approaches (philosophy, experimental psychology, computational models) to study both humans (children and adults) and artificial intelligence. I am interested in the unique minds that underlie human rationality and aim to explore the nature and origins of human intentional actions and agency. My current focus is on the social-cognitive mechanisms of intention and commitment.
I’m currently working as a joint-appointed postdoc in a computational cognitive science lab at UCLA (Visual Intelligence Lab, PI: Dr. Tao Gao) and a developmental psychology lab at Duke University (Early Childhood Cognition Lab, PI: Dr. Tamar Kushnir).
My most current project explores collaborative decision-making in children to create better artificial social agents.
Representative Papers
Cheng, S., Zhao, M., Tang, N., Zhao, Y., Zhou J., Shen, M., & Gao T. (2023). Intention beyond desire: Spontaneous intentional commitment regulates conflicting desires. Cognition, 238, 105513. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105513 [PDF]
This paper establishes the phenomenon of intentional commitment and discusses the social-cognitive mechanisms underlying it.
Cheng, S., Zhu, J., Zhou J., Shen, M., & Gao T. (in press). Spontaneous Coordination with Self-Commitment: How the Presence of Others Alters the Strength, Goal and Timing of Commitment. Cognition. [preprint-version]
This paper explores a social origin of spontaneous intentional commitment. We propose a “social inner eye” hypothesis, assuming commitment in individual decision-making arises from an internalized self-presentation, transferring the audience of commitment from a real partner to an inner eye perspective. We demonstrate how social context influences the strength, content, and timing of individual commitment.
Zhai, S#., Cheng, S#., Moskowitz, N., Shen, M., & Gao, T. (2024). The development of commitment: Attention for intention. Child Development, 95(1), 7-15. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13955 [PDF]
# joint first author
This paper explores the developmental origins of intentional commitment and the cognitive mechanisms underlying it.
Cheng, S., Zhao, M., Zhu, J., Zhou J., Shen, M., & Gao T. (2022). Intentional commitment through an internalized theory of mind: Acting in the eyes of an imagined observer. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
This paper proposes a computational model of intention based on the internalized theory of mind hypothesis.
Cheng, S., Zhao, M., Zhu, J., Zhou J., Shen, M., & Gao T. (2022). The presentation of self: Exploring the computational and social origins of self-commitment. Workshop on Social Intelligence in Humans and Robots in the annual meeting of the Robotics: Science and Systems 2022.
This ongoing project examines two functional hypotheses of intentional commitment: the computational constraint hypothesis and the social origin hypothesis. (An earlier version: PDF)
Recent Conference Posters
- [VSS-2025]