Andrew Meltzoff

About

Andrew Meltzoff, PhD, 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. He is an internationally renowned expert on infant and child development, with a background that includes a BA from Harvard University and a PhD from Oxford University. Meltzoff's research has significantly advanced understanding of early cognition and social learning, particularly through his discoveries about infant imitation, which have transformed perspectives in developmental cognitive neuroscience. His work on preschoolers' social biases and children's STEM-gender stereotypes has helped bridge developmental and social psychology, while his recent research on infant altruism continues to expand interdisciplinary connections. Meltzoff's studies on young children have implications across cognitive psychology, brain science, and educational science, especially regarding memory, intentionality, multimodal coding, shared neural circuits, and the influence of role models and stereotypes on child development. His 'Like-Me' framework for social development emphasizes that young children seek out and recognize other social beings as 'like me,' informing work in autism spectrum disorder, social robotics, and philosophy of mind. Recognized with numerous awards, including the 2020 William James Fellow Award from the APS and the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Developmental Psychology from the…

Research topics

• Sociology
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Gender studies
• Clinical psychology
• Psychiatry
• Social psychology
• Developmental psychology

Selected publications

• Gender stereotypes about interests start early and cause gender disparities in computer science and engineering

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 272 citations

  = 172; both preregistered) experimentally demonstrate that 8- to 9-y-old girls are significantly less interested in an activity marked with a gender stereotype ("girls are less interested in this activity than boys") compared to an activity with no such stereotype ("girls and boys are equally interested in this activity"). Taken together, both ecologically valid real-world studies (Studies 1 and 2) and controlled preregistered laboratory experiments (Studies 3 and 4) reveal that stereotypes that…

  PublisherDOI

• Promoting youth mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: A longitudinal study

  PLoS ONE · 2021 · 165 citations

  The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced novel stressors into the lives of youth. Identifying factors that protect against the onset of psychopathology in the face of these stressors is critical. We examine a wide range of factors that may protect youth from developing psychopathology during the pandemic. We assessed pandemic-related stressors, internalizing and externalizing psychopathology, and potential protective factors by combining two longitudinal samples of children and adolescents (N = 224,…

  PublisherDOI

• Causes and consequences of stereotypes: interest stereotypes reduce adolescent girls’ motivation to enroll in computer science classes

  Journal of Research on Technology in Education · 2024-10-03 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• National disparities favoring males are reflected in girls’ implicit associations about gender and academic subjects.

  Developmental Psychology · 2024-08-22 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  were positively related to both national male advantages in socioeconomic standing and national boy advantages in Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Second, these relations were obtained for implicit but not explicit measures of children's beliefs linking gender and academic subjects. Third, implicit associations linking gender to academic subjects increased significantly as a function of children's age. We propose a psychological account of why national gender disparities ar…

  PublisherDOI

• Divergence in children’s gender stereotypes and motivation across STEM fields

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-05-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  = 2,765), we find a significant divergence in students' gender stereotypes about different STEM fields. Gender stereotypes about computer science and engineering more strongly favored boys than did gender stereotypes about math and science. These patterns hold across genders, intersections of gender and race/ethnicity, and two geographical regions. This divergence between different STEM fields was evident, although smaller, for children in elementary school compared to adolescents (students in m…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• SL-CN: Development of Neural Body Maps

  NSF · $749k · 2015–2019

• NIH Grant T32HD007391

  NIH · $1.7M · 2001

• Young Children's Causal Learning from Probabilistic Social and Physical Displays

  NSF · $499k · 2013–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Patricia K. Kuhl

  University of Washington

  44 shared

• Rechele Brooks

  University of Washington

  36 shared

• Alison Gopnik

  University of California, Berkeley

  36 shared

• Dario Cvencek

  Institute for Learning Innovation

  35 shared

• Peter J. Marshall

  33 shared

• Maggie Moore

  Slippery Rock University

  32 shared

• Maya L. Rosen

  27 shared

• Katie A. McLaughlin

  Harvard University Press

  26 shared

Labs

• Speech & Hearing Sciences - Andrew Meltzoff LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Dept. of Experimental Psychology

  University of Oxford

  1976

Awards & honors

• William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psycholo…
• Award for Distinguished Contributions to Developmental Psych…
• Kurt Koffka Medal (Germany) (2016)
• Kenneth Craik Award in Psychology, Cambridge University (200…
• Recognition for outstanding research by the Society for Deve…

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