Melissa Kibbe

Melissa Kibbe is an Associate Professor at Boston University and Director of the Developing Minds Lab. Her research explores how infants, children, and adults process and represent information about objects, focusing on perceptual features, animacy, numerosity, and verbal labels. She investigates cognitive systems like working memory, attention, and decision-making through behavioral and computational methods. Kibbe holds a PhD from Rutgers University.

Key research interests include non-symbolic arithmetic in young children, object representation limits in infants, and social categorization strategies. Her work bridges developmental psychology and cognitive science, emphasizing memory-guided planning and the interplay between perception and cognition. Recent studies examine how children reason with mutually exclusive possibilities and the role of socio-economic factors in executive function.

Publications highlight topics like episodic-like memory in infancy, catastrophic object representation failures, and the development of precision in arithmetic operations. Kibbe’s lab, the Developing Minds Lab, explores these themes through experimental and computational approaches.