Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early emotional attachment between a child and its primary caregiver.
Andrew N. Meltzoff is an American psychologist and an internationally recognized expert on infant and child development. His discoveries about infant imitation greatly advanced the scientific understanding of early cognition, personality and brain development.
Patricia Katherine Kuhl is a Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. She specializes in language acquisition and the neural bases of language, and she has also conducted research on language development in autism and computer speech recognition. Kuhl currently serves as an associate editor for the journals Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Neuroscience, and Developmental Science.
Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition, children's development of concepts, conceptual changes over time, and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood (1985) and The Origin of Concepts (2009).
Nora S. Newcombe is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and the James H. Glackin Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Temple University. She is a Canadian-American researcher in cognitive development, cognitive psychology and cognitive science, and expert on the development of spatial thinking and reasoning and episodic memory. She was the principal investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (2006-2018), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation.
Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, the college, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She is the principal investigator of a 10-year program project grant, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on language growth. She is also a co-PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation to explore learning in an interdisciplinary framework with an eye toward theory and application. She is the founding editor of Language Learning and Development, the official journal of the Society for Language Development. She was President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2007–2012.
Susan A. Gelman is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Gelman studies language and concept development in young children. Gelman subscribes to the domain specificity view of cognition, which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals. Her book The Essential Child is an influential work on cognitive development.
Ellen Markman is Lewis M. Terman Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. She specializes in word learning and language development in children, focusing specifically on how children come to associate words with their meanings. Markman contends that in order to learn the meaning of a word, children make use of three basic principles: the whole object assumption, the taxonomic assumption, and the mutual exclusivity assumption. Related topics that Markman has studied include categorization and inductive reasoning in children and infants. Markman subscribes to the innatist school of developmental psychologists, which asserts that children possess innate knowledge that they draw upon in the process of language acquisition.
Some of the research that is conducted in the field of psychology is more "fundamental" than the research conducted in the applied psychological disciplines, and does not necessarily have a direct application. The subdisciplines within psychology that can be thought to reflect a basic-science orientation include biological psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and so on. Research in these subdisciplines is characterized by methodological rigor. The concern of psychology as a basic science is in understanding the laws and processes that underlie behavior, cognition, and emotion. Psychology as a basic science provides a foundation for applied psychology. Applied psychology, by contrast, involves the application of psychological principles and theories yielded up by the basic psychological sciences; these applications are aimed at overcoming problems or promoting well-being in areas such as mental and physical health and education.
Renée Baillargeon is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Baillargeon specializes in the development of cognition in infancy.
Katherine Nelson was an American developmental psychologist, and professor.
Karen Wynn is an artist and a Canadian and American Yale University Professor Emerita of psychology and cognitive science. She was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up on the Canadian prairies in Regina, Saskatchewan. Her research explores the cognitive capacities of infants and young children. She directed for over 3 decades the Infant Cognition Laboratory, first in the Psychology Department at the University of Arizona, and then in the Psychology Department at Yale University.
Sandra Robin Waxman is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is a Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and director of the University's Infant and Child Development Center. She is known for her work on the development of language and concepts in infants and children.
Laura E. Schulz is a professor of cognitive science in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is the Principal Investigator of the Early Childhood Cognition Lab at MIT. Schulz is known for her work on early childhood development of cognition, causal inference, discovery, and learning.
Janet F. Werker is a researcher in the field of developmental psychology. She researches the foundations of monolingual and bilingual infant language acquisition in infants at the University of British Columbia's Infant Studies Centre. Her research has pioneered what are now accepted baselines in the field, showing that language learning begins in early infancy and is shaped by experience across the first year of life.
Mary Klevjord Rothbart is professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon. She is known for her research in the fields of temperament and social development, emotional development, and development of attention. She was a co-founder of Birth to Three, a parent support and education program. She has written over 159 articles related to educational psychology, developmental psychology, developmental cognitive neuroscience and biological psychology. Rothbart has also authored and co-authored many books, including Becoming Who We Are, for which she received the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award from the American Psychological Association. Two other popular volumes by Rothbart are Temperament, a Handbook of Child Psychology, and Attention in Early Development: Themes and Variations.
Frances Degen Horowitz was an American developmental psychologist who served as President of the Graduate Center, City University of New York from 1991 to 2005. She was instrumental in raising the stature of the institution and moving it to its current location in the B. Altman and Company Building on Fifth Avenue of New York City.
Dare Ann Baldwin is a scientist known for her research on learning mechanisms and early social skills of infants and young children. Baldwin is a professor of psychology at Oregon University. Baldwin is the recipient of various awards including the 1994 Boyd McCandless Award from Division 7 of the American Psychological Association, 1995 John Merck Scholars Award, 1997 APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology, 2006-2007 James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Fellowship, 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 2006-2007 University of Oregon Fund for Faculty Excellence Award, and 2018 University of Oregon Faculty Research Award.
Lisa Feigenson is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Laboratory for Child Development. Feigenson is known for her research on the development of numerical abilities, working memory, and early learning. She has served on the editorial board of Cognition and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Beatriz Luna is a developmental neuroscientist known for conducting neuroimaging research on the development of cognitive control, reward, and reinforcement learning from early childhood to adolescence.
