Andrew Meltzoff

University of Washington, Seattle

Professor and Co-Director

Dr. Andrew N. Meltzoff holds the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair in Psychology and is the Co-Director of the University of Washington's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. A graduate of Harvard, with a PhD from Oxford, he is an internationally renowned expert on infant and child development. His discoveries about infant imitation helped transform our understanding of early cognition and social learning and sparked experiments on infant neural body maps in developmental cognitive neuroscience. His research on preschoolers' social biases and children's STEM-gender stereotypes has helped build bridges between developmental and social psychology. His recent work on infant altruism continues to expand these interdisciplinary connections. Meltzoff's research on young children has had implications for cognitive psychology, especially concerning memory and intentionality; for brain science, especially for multimodal coding and shared neural circuits for perception and action; and for educational science, concerning the impact of role models and cultural stereotypes on child development. Meltzoff's 'Like-Me' framework for social development, which holds that young children seek out and register other social beings as 'like me,' has engendered empirical and theoretical work in autism spectrum disorder, social robotics, developmental cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of mind.