Andrew Meltzoff

University of Washington, Seattle

Professor and Co-Director

Dr. Andrew N. Meltzoff is a professor of Psychology and 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 gender stereotypes about STEM has helped build bridges between developmental science and social psychology. His recent work on infant altruism and the role of cultural values in the development of young children’s prosocial behavior further expands these interdisciplinary connections.

Meltzoff's research on infant and child development has implications for cognitive psychology, especially concerning memory and intentionality; for brain science, especially for multimodal coding and shared neural networks for perception and action; and for educational science, especially for the impact of societal stereotypes on children’s interests, development, and aspirations. Meltzoff's 'Like-Me' framework for social development, which holds that young children 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.