Marissa L. Greif

Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Yale '05
Research Area: Developmental, Cognitive

Contact Information:
Office: BS 207
Telephone: (561) 297-3362
Fax: (561) 297- 2160
E-mail: mgreif@fau.edu

General Research Interests

My laboratory investigates the development of thought and instrumental action in infants and children. Broadly, I am interested in the types of cues and strategies young children use to learn about and categorize objects. More specifically, I am interested in how they come to understand the functions and applications of tools. My lab is currently exploring three domains of information that very young children rely on to become skilled and mature tool users: 1) the goals and intentions of tool users in their immediate environment, 2) the physical structures or affordances that constrain an object's function, and 3) the object exploration strategies that allow children to "discover" tool functions.

We use several converging methodologies to explore these issues including habituation and violation-of-expectation paradigms, behavioral interaction methods in which children use novel tools to solve problems, and remote eye-tracking.

Representative Publications

Greif, M. L., Kemler Nelson, D. G., Keil, F., & Gutierrez, F. (2006). What do children want to know about animals and artifacts?: Domain-specific requests for information. Psychological Science, 17, 455-459.

Keil, F. C., Greif, M.L., & Kerner, R. S. (2007). A World Apart: How concepts of the constructed world are different in representation and in development. In S. Laurence & E. Margolis (Eds.), Creations of the Mind: Theories of Artifacts and their Representation. Oxford University Press.

Keil, F. C., Kim, N. S., & Greif, M. L. (2002). Categories and levels of information. In E. Forde and G. Humphreys (Eds.), Category Specificity in Brain and Mind. Psychology Press.

Links: Children's Learning Lab