Malinda Carpenter

Malinda Carpenter FRSE
Occupation	Professor of Developmental Psychology
Employer	University of St. Andrews
Organization	Max Planck Society
Known for	research into infant and child communications and learning; prosocial behaviour; ape and human social cognition and Human–robot interaction communication futures

Malinda Carpenter,Ph.D, FRSE is a professor of developmental psychology at the University of St Andrews, an international researcher specialising in infant and child communications,^[1] prosocial behaviour and group reactions, in how people learn to understand others, and building self esteem;^[2] her work includes research between ape and human social cognition,^[3] and more recently in considering human-robotic communication futures.^[4]

Education and career

Carpenter graduated in French and Psychology, from the University of Florida, Gainesville in 1990, and took her masters in 1993 and doctorate in 1995, at Emory University, USA on Social-cognitive abilities of 9- to 15-month-old infants: Development and interrelationships.^[5][6] She spend two years post-doc research at the National Institute of Mental Health Postdoctoral Training Program in Developmental Psychology (focussing on autism) at the University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA and then a further two years as a post-doc Fellow at the University of Liverpool, England.^[5] She collaborated with Virginia Slaughter, of the University of Queensland, Australia in 2008-09.^[7][8] Since 2013, she has worked in the University of St. Andrews, Scotland and continued her relationship with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology^[9] in Leipzig, Germany,^[10] since 1999, when she was senior scientist on Social Origins of Cultural Cognition in Infancy and (from 2008- 2013) when she was awarded funding to head the Minerva Foundation Research Group in the Max Planck Institute. She joined academia.net in 2010 and speaks English, French, German, Spanish.^[5]

Carpenter has been an invited or a keynote speaker at international conferences and key summer schools over her career, for example:

• Cultural Learning, Imitation and Articraft Understanding: A Comparative Perspective at summer school, Central European University, 2005^[11]
• 'What makes humans human?' at AX Foundation seminar 2011^[12]
• Human Robot Interaction at Bielefeld University 2014^[10]
• From Human-Human Joint Action to Human-Robot Joint Action, and vice versa!, at Toulouse, 2016:^[13] The jointness in infants’ and young children’s joint action and joint attention
• Guest speaker at cross-discipline summer workshop for early career researchers, Brace yourself! at St. Andrews, 2018.^[14]

For an up to date list of her academic related activities, see the activities page on the staff profile at the University of St. Andrews.^[15]

Recognition

In 2012, Carpenter was selected as a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science.^[1] In 2018, one of her supervised students, Amrisha Vaish won their early career award.^[16]

She was associate editor of the academic journal Cognition (2013–14) and on the editorial board of Child Development Perspectives since 2013.^[1]

At the opening of the Leipzig Center for Early Child Development, in 2016, marking the 50th anniversary of conferences of the German Society for Psychology, Carpenter was asked to be one of the keynote speakers,^[17] talking upon Affiliation, alignment and belonging in infancy and early childhood.

In 2021, Carpenter was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.^[2]

She has joined the Templeton World Charity Foundation funded Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute: 'A new community exploring intelligence, mind, and cognition in all its forms'.^[18]

Research experiments and publications

Carpenter's research has involved practical as well as theoretical studies and in outreach to share her findings with the public. Her studies have formed part of international research bases, cited for psychology and developmental behavioural themes, such as

• Imitation^[19][20]
• Intention^[21][22][23]
• Joint attention^[24][25]
• Nonverbal communication^[26]
• Bootstrapping (linguistics)^[27]

Her earlier experiments were described in detail so they could be replicated.^[27] Her collaborative research on chimpanzees was published in a book.^[28] As well as collaborations listed, her work was also with Michael Tomasello and jointly published their 2005 research,^[23] and earlier George Butterworth.^[29] Her international interests in 2017 extended to bilingualism in young children,^[30] and she was nominated by the students union in St. Andrew's for a 2019 Teaching Awards and shortlisted as a finalist for her academic mentorship.^[31]

Later she engaged in more public communications on the research and its impact for child development practices and parenting skills. Carpenter supported a local community science outreach (March 2018: becoming one of us),^[32] and a public radio debate on 'crowd science', as reported in Church Times.^[33] She was interviewed in the Greater Good podcast, from Berkeley on how her experiment on using familiar objects and dolls positioning, to see if they influenced children's behaviour towards acting helpfully to adults.^[34][35] The St. Andrew's Baby and Child (ABC) Lab. was another such project, which had been enrolling mother and child pairs, and individual children to observe and assist the research. The project drew the attention of Netflix for a follow up to its TV series on Babies? The series 2 episode 4 Relationships was described as 'A coy smile, a puppet show and a pointed finger lead to discoveries in how babies get along with others using humor, morality and shared experiences', and featured Carpenter's team's studies.^[36]

External resources

• Netflix trailer for Babies? season 2^[37]
• Research publications (University of St. Andrew's listing) [1]
• Research works (Orcid Listing)[2]
• Research works (LOOP Listing)[3]

References

1. "Malinda Carpenter - University of St Andrews". risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
2. "Professor Malinda Carpenter FRSE". The Royal Society of Edinburgh. 5 May 2021. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
3. "Vol. 70, No. 1, 2005 of Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development on JSTOR". www.jstor.org. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
4. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, International Conference on Development and Learning (23 August 2021). "KEYNOTES – IEEE ICDL 2021- KN2 - What does it mean to share attention and knowledge?". icdl-2021.org. Beijing. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
5. Carpenter, Malinda (28 June 2010). "Prof. Malinda Carpenter - AcademiaNet". www.academia-net.org. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
6. AxFoundation (2011). "Human Nature 2011 - What Makes Humans Human". Axfoundation. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
7. Slaughter, Virginia; Peterson, Candida C.; Carpenter, Malinda (November 2009). "Maternal mental state talk and infants' early gestural communication". Journal of Child Language. 36 (5): 1053–1074. doi:10.1017/S0305000908009306. ISSN 0305-0009. PMID 19215636. S2CID 15076489.
8. Slaughter, Virginia; Peterson, Candida C.; Carpenter, Malinda (12 November 2008). "Maternal Talk About Mental States and the Emergence of Joint Visual Attention". Infancy. 13 (6): 640–659. doi:10.1080/15250000802458807.
9. "Former Staff - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology". www.eva.mpg.de. 2021. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
10. Yukie, Nagai; Lohan, Katrin Solveig (2014). "HRI: a bridge between Robotics and Neuroscience". www.macs.hw.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
11. Central European University (4 July 2005). "Malinda Carpenter | CEU Summer University". summeruniversity.ceu.edu. Archived from the original on 9 September 2021. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
12. Ax Foundation (2011). "Human Nature 2011 - What Makes Humans Human". Axfoundation. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
13. CoCoRHICo (Communication and Cooperation in Robot-Human InteraCtiOn) (4 April 2016). "From Human-Human Joint Action to Human-Robot Joint Action and vice-versa !". hrja.sciencesconf.org. IDEX program "Transversalité" of Toulouse University.
14. "Summer Workshop 2018". ESLR. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
15. "Malinda Carpenter - Activities - University of St Andrews". risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
16. "2018 APS Janet Taylor Spence Awards for Transformative Early Career Contributions". APS Observer. 31 (5). 27 April 2018.
17. "Official Opening of the Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development". Leipziger Forschungszentrum für frühkindliche Entwicklung. 22 September 2016. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
18. Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (2021). "Faculty and Staff". DISI. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
19. Tomasello, Michael (1 November 2006). "Rational Imitation in 12-Month-Old Infants Christiane Schwier, Catharine van Maanen, Malinda Carpenter". Infancy. 10 (3): 303–311. doi:10.1207/s15327078in1003_6. ISSN 1525-0008.
20. Evans, Cara L.; Laland, Kevin N.; Carpenter, Malinda; Kendal, Rachel L. (2018). "Selective copying of the majority suggests children are broadly "optimal-" rather than "over-" imitators". Developmental Science. 21 (5): e12637. doi:10.1111/desc.12637. hdl:10023/16702. ISSN 1467-7687. PMID 29250871.
21. Liszkowski, Ulf; Carpenter, Malinda; Tomasello, Michael (2007). "Pointing out new news, old news, and absent referents at 12 months of age". Developmental Science. 10 (2): F1 – F7. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2006.00552.x. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-0013-2510-1. ISSN 1467-7687. PMID 17286836.
22. Liszkowski, Ulf; Carpenter, M.; Henning, Anne; Striano, T.; Tomasello, M. (2004). "Twelve-month-olds point to share attention and interest". Developmental Science. 7 (3): 297–307. doi:10.1111/J.1467-7687.2004.00349.X. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-0013-2524-6. PMID 15595371. S2CID 3915664.
23. Tomasello, Michael; Carpenter, Malinda; Call, Josep; Behne, Tanya; Moll, Henrike (October 2005). "Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition". Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 28 (5): 675–691. doi:10.1017/S0140525X05000129. ISSN 0140-525X. PMID 16262930. S2CID 3900485.
24. Rossano, Federico; Carpenter, Malinda; Tomasello, Michael (1 November 2012). "One-Year-Old Infants Follow Others' Voice Direction". Psychological Science. 23 (11): 1298–1302. doi:10.1177/0956797612450032. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-000F-EDCC-9. ISSN 0956-7976. PMID 23070306. S2CID 7116952.
25. León, Felipe (19 May 2021). "Joint attention without recursive mindreading: On the role of second-person engagement". Philosophical Psychology. 34 (4): 550–580. doi:10.1080/09515089.2021.1917533. ISSN 0951-5089. S2CID 233873440.
26. Liebal, Kristin; Carpenter, Malinda; Tomasello, Michael (September 2011). "Young children's understanding of markedness in non-verbal communication*". Journal of Child Language. 38 (4): 888–903. doi:10.1017/S0305000910000383. ISSN 1469-7602. PMID 21382221. S2CID 10428965.
27. Akhtar, Nameera; Carpenter, Malinda; Tomasello, Michael (1996). "The Role of Discourse Novelty in Early Word Learning". Child Development. 67 (2): 635–645. doi:10.2307/1131837. ISSN 0009-3920. JSTOR 1131837.
28. Tomasello, Michael (2005). The emergence of social cognition in three young chimpanzees. Malinda Carpenter, R. Peter Hobson. Boston, Mass.: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-4726-2. OCLC 61661628.
29. Carpenter, Malinda; Nagell, Katherine; Tomasello, Michael; Butterworth, George; Moore, Chris (1998). "Social Cognition, Joint Attention, and Communicative Competence from 9 to 15 Months of Age". Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. 63 (4): i. doi:10.2307/1166214. ISSN 0037-976X. JSTOR 1166214.
30. Quick, Antje Endesfelder; Lieven, Elena; Carpenter, Malinda; Tomasello, Michael (6 February 2018). "Identifying partially schematic units in the code-mixing of an English and German speaking child". Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. 8 (4): 477–501. doi:10.1075/lab.15049.qui. hdl:10023/10590. ISSN 1879-9264. S2CID 151831308.
31. Students' Association, St. Andrews (2019). "Teaching Awards". www.yourunion.net. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
32. "Pitlochry-Aberfeldy-Dunkeld – Cafe Scientifique". Retrieved 9 September 2021.
33. Wickham, Edward (23 March 2018). "Radio review: The Life Scientific, Crowd Science, and In Our Time". www.churchtimes.co.uk. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
34. "Episode 37: What Are Your Strongest Reminders of Connection?". Greater Good. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
35. Plötner, Maria; Over, Harriet; Carpenter, Malinda; Tomasello, Michael (1 April 2015). "Young Children Show the Bystander Effect in Helping Situations". Psychological Science. 26 (4): 499–506. doi:10.1177/0956797615569579. hdl:10023/6002. ISSN 0956-7976. PMID 25792132. S2CID 40004606.
36. University of St Andrews, Baby and Child Lab. (2021). "Netflix Babies – ABC Lab". developmentlab.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
37. "Babies | Netflix Official Site". www.netflix.com. Retrieved 9 September 2021.