Photo of Alicia Chen

Alicia M Chen

Email: aliciach@mit.edu
Socials: Twitter / Bluesky / GitHub
Google Scholar: here
CV: here

About

I am a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, advised by Rebecca Saxe. I am interested in how people use abstract, structured knowledge about our social environments to decide how to act and how to interpret other people’s behavior. Previously, I graduated from Harvard College in 2022 with an AB in Chemistry & Physics.

Preprints and working papers

  1. Alicia M Chen, Ashley J Thomas, Joshua B Tenenbaum, and Rebecca Saxe. Inverse planning of social interactions in relationships. (submitted)
  2. Alicia M Chen, Rebecca Saxe, and Robert D Hawkins. Disentangling passive and active origins of linguistic diversity using experimental microsocieties. (submitted)
  3. Alicia M Chen and Rebecca Saxe. Generous acts have contrasting meanings in equal versus hierarchical social relationships. (in prep)

Journal articles

  1. Alicia M Chen, Robert D Hawkins, and Rebecca Saxe. Signaling social identity in referential communication. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, in press.
  2. Alicia M Chen and Rebecca Saxe. Expectations of reciprocal generosity are specific to equal relationships. Open Mind, 2026.
  3. Alicia M Chen, Kartik Chandra, and Rebecca Saxe. Computational models of social cognition should incorporate social relationships as core primitives. Commentary on Thomas, A. J. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2026.
  4. Alicia M Chen*, Matthias Hofer*, Moshe Poliak, Roger Levy, and Noga Zaslavsky. Discrete and systematic communication in a continuous signal-meaning space. Journal of Language Evolution, 2025. [Hurford prize for best student oral presentation, Evolang XV]
  5. Alicia M Chen, Andrew Palacci, Natalia Vélez, Robert D Hawkins*, and Samuel J Gershman*. A hierarchical Bayesian model of adaptive teaching. Cognitive Science, 2024.
  6. Natalia Vélez, Alicia M Chen, Taylor Burke, Fiery A Cushman*, and Samuel J Gershman*. Teachers recruit mentalizing regions to represent learners' beliefs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2023.
  7. Luis Hernandez-Nunez, Alicia Chen, Gonzalo Budelli, Matthew E Berck, Vincent Richter, Anna Rist, Andreas S Thum, Albert Cardona, Mason Klein, Paul Garrity, and Aravinthan DT Samuel. Synchronous and opponent thermosensors use flexible cross-inhibition to orchestrate thermal homeostasis. Science Advances, 2021.

Conference papers

  1. Alicia M Chen, Ashley J Thomas, Joshua B Tenenbaum, and Rebecca Saxe. A social inverse-planning model captures how relationship intimacy constrains action planning and interpretation. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2026.
  2. Alicia M Chen and Rebecca Saxe. How turn taking communicates desired equality in social relationships. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2024.
  3. Alicia M Chen and Rebecca Saxe. People have systematic expectations linking social relationships to patterns of reciprocal altruism. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2023.