Melissa Kibbe | Profiles RNS

Melissa Kibbe, PhD Hear my name

Associate Professor

Boston University College of Arts and Sciences

Psychological and Brain Sciences

PhD, Rutgers University
MS, Rutgers University
BA, University of Massachusetts Boston
BS, University of Massachusetts Boston

Websites

	Psychological & Brain Sciences
	CDL
	Google Scholar
	Linkedin
	Research Gate

ORCID : 0000-0002-9088-2523

Melissa Kibbe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University, and the director of the Developing Minds Lab. She received her doctorate from Rutgers University, working on object cognition in infants and adults. Prior to her appointment at Boston University she held a position as a postdoctoral researcher in Lab for Child Development at Johns Hopkins University.

Research Interests:
The world is rich with visual information, but our brains process and store only a small fraction of the information available. How do we decide which information we should keep track of, and how do we store and use this information efficiently? Dr. Kibbe's research focuses on how infants, children, and adults represent information about objects (e.g. perceptual features, animacy, group statistics, numerosity, verbal labels). She also looks at the kinds of computations we can do with these representations, and the ways in which we use these representations to guide behavior. Finally, she studies how cognitive systems (such as working memory, attention, social cognition, and decision-making) interact during complex tasks. Dr. Kibbe's research relies on both behavioral methods and computational modeling of cognitive processes.

Director - Developing Minds Lab
Boston University College of Arts and Sciences
Psychological and Brain Sciences
Child Development Labs

BU Research

Collaborative Research: A Multi-Lab Investigation of the Conceptual Foundations of Early Number Development
07/15/2022 - 06/30/2026 (PI)
National Science Foundation
DRL-2201961

Investigating Approximate Number System Computation in Children
07/01/2019 - 06/30/2023 (PI)
National Science Foundation
BCS - 1844155

Development of Episodic Future Thinking: Limits, Flexibility, and Neural Correlates
09/01/2018 - 01/31/2021 (Key Person / Mentor)
NIH/National Institute of Child Health & Human Development
5F32HD094554-03

Title

Yr	Title	Project-Sub Proj	Pubs

Publications listed below are automatically derived from MEDLINE/PubMed and other sources, which might result in incorrect or missing publications. Faculty can login to make corrections and additions.

iCite Analysis Copy PMIDs To Clipboard

Wang JJ, Kibbe MM. "Catastrophic" set size limits on infants' capacity to represent objects: A systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis. Dev Sci. 2024 Feb 29; e13488. PMID: 38421117

Turan-Küçük EN, Kibbe MM. Three-year-olds' ability to plan for mutually exclusive future possibilities is limited primarily by their representations of possible plans, not possible events. Cognition. 2024 Mar; 244:105712. PMID: 38160650

Cheng C, Kibbe MM. Development of precision of non-symbolic arithmetic operations in 4-6-year-old children. Front Psychol. 2023; 14:1286195. PMID: 38034281; PMCID: PMC10684939; DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1286195;

Peretz-Lange R, Kibbe MM. "Shape bias" goes social: Children categorize people by weight rather than race. Dev Sci. 2024 Mar; 27(2):e13454. PMID: 37846779

Kibbe MM. The language-of-thought as a working hypothesis for developmental cognitive science. Behav Brain Sci. 2023 Sep 28; 46:e280. PMID: 37766618

Cheng C, Kibbe MM. Children's use of reasoning by exclusion to infer objects' identities in working memory. J Exp Child Psychol. 2024 Jan; 237:105765. PMID: 37690346

Kibbe MM, Stahl AE. An object's categorizability impacts whether infants encode surface features into their object representations. Infancy. 2023; 28(5):958-972. PMID: 37394971

Cheng C, Kibbe MM. Is Nonsymbolic Arithmetic Truly "Arithmetic"? Examining the Computational Capacity of the Approximate Number System in Young Children. Cogn Sci. 2023 Jun; 47(6):e13299. PMID: 37303302

Kibbe MM, Stahl AE. Objects in a social world: Infants' object representational capacity limits are shaped by objects' social relevance. Adv Child Dev Behav. 2023; 65:69-97. PMID: 37481301

Blankenship TL, Kibbe MM. "Plan chunking" expands 3-year-olds' ability to complete multiple-step plans. Child Dev. 2023; 94(5):1330-1339. PMID: 37092570

Showing 10 of 39 results. Show More

Kenderla P, Kim SH, Kibbe MM. Competition Between Object Topology and Surface Features in Children's Extension of Novel Nouns. Open Mind (Camb). 2023; 7:93-110. PMID: 37416072; PMCID: PMC10320823; DOI: 10.1162/opmi_a_00073;

Mandelbaum E, Dunham Y, Feiman R, Firestone C, Green EJ, Harris D, Kibbe MM, Kurdi B, Mylopoulos M, Shepherd J, Wellwood A, Porot N, Quilty-Dunn J. Problems and Mysteries of the Many Languages of Thought. Cogn Sci. 2022 Dec; 46(12):e13225. PMID: 36537721

Kenderla P, Kibbe MM. Explore versus store: Children strategically trade off reliance on exploration versus working memory during a complex task. J Exp Child Psychol. 2023 Jan; 225:105535. PMID: 36041236

Kibbe MM, Applin JB. Tracking what went where across toddlerhood: Feature-location bound object representations in 2- to 3-year-olds' working memory. Child Dev. 2022 Nov; 93(6):1713-1726. PMID: 35716069

Cheng C, Kibbe MM. Development of updating in working memory in 4-7-year-old children. Dev Psychol. 2022 May; 58(5):902-912. PMID: 35311308

Blankenship TL, Kibbe MM. Two-year-olds use past memories to accomplish novel goals. J Exp Child Psychol. 2022 02; 214:105286. PMID: 34500114; PMCID: PMC8608730; DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105286;

Smith-Flores AS, Applin JB, Blake PR, Kibbe MM. Children's understanding of economic demand: A dissociation between inference and choice. Cognition. 2021 09; 214:104747.View Related Profiles.

Kibbe, Melissa
Blake, Peter

PMID: 33971529

Applin JB, Kibbe MM. Young children monitor the fidelity of visual working memory. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2021 May; 47(5):808-819. PMID: 33151715

Blankenship TL, Strong RW, Kibbe MM. Development of multiple object tracking via multifocal attention. Dev Psychol. 2020 Sep; 56(9):1684-1695. PMID: 32614210; PMCID: PMC8603249; DOI: 10.1037/dev0001064;

Gruen RL, Esfand SM, Kibbe MM. Altruistic self-regulation in young children. J Exp Child Psychol. 2020 01; 189:104700. PMID: 31623851

Blankenship TL, Kibbe MM. Examining the limits of Memory-Guided Planning in 3- and 4-year olds. Cogn Dev. 2019 Oct-Dec; 52. PMID: 32863569; PMCID: PMC7450979; DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2019.100820;

Kibbe MM, Leslie AM. Conceptually Rich, Perceptually Sparse: Object Representations in 6-Month-Old Infants' Working Memory. Psychol Sci. 2019 03; 30(3):362-375. PMID: 30668927

Applin JB, Kibbe MM. Six-Month-Old Infants Predict Agents' Goal-Directed Actions on Occluded Objects. Infancy. 2019 May; 24(3):392-410. PMID: 32677190

St John AM, Kibbe M, Tarullo AR. A systematic assessment of socioeconomic status and executive functioning in early childhood. J Exp Child Psychol. 2019 02; 178:352-368. PMID: 30292568

Bloem IM, Watanabe YL, Kibbe MM, Ling S. Visual Memories Bypass Normalization. Psychol Sci. 2018 05; 29(5):845-856. PMID: 29596038; PMCID: PMC5945309; DOI: 10.1177/0956797617747091;

Kibbe MM, Kaldy Z, Blaser E. Rules infants look by: Testing the assumption of transitivity in visual salience. Infancy. 2018 Mar-Apr; 23(2):156-172. PMID: 29662430; PMCID: PMC5898438; DOI: 10.1111/infa.12219;

Kibbe MM, Feigenson L. A dissociation between small and large numbers in young children's ability to "solve for x" in non-symbolic math problems. Cognition. 2017 Mar; 160:82-90. PMID: 28068528; DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.006;

Kibbe MM, Leslie AM. The ring that does not bind: Topological class in infants’ working memory for objects. Cognitive Development. 2016; 38:1-9. View Publication
Kibbe MM. Varieties of Visual Working Memory Representation in Infancy and Beyond. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 2015; 24(6). View Publication

Kibbe MM, Feigenson L. Infants use temporal regularities to chunk objects in memory. Cognition. 2016 Jan; 146:251-63. PMID: 26484498; DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.09.022;

Kibbe MM. Visual working memory for multiple moving objects in occlusion. Journal of Vision. 2015; 15(12):545. View Publication

Kibbe M. Visual working memory for multiple moving objects in occlusion. J Vis. 2015; 15(12):545. PMID: 26326233; DOI: 10.1167/15.12.545;

Kibbe MM, Feigenson L. Developmental origins of recoding and decoding in memory. Cogn Psychol. 2014 Dec; 75:55-79. PMID: 25195153; DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2014.08.001;

Kibbe MM, Feigenson L. Young children 'solve for x' using the Approximate Number System. Dev Sci. 2015 Jan; 18(1):38-49. PMID: 24589420; PMCID: PMC4394201; DOI: 10.1111/desc.12177;

Denisova K, Kibbe MM, Cholewiak SA, Kim SH. Intra- and intermanual curvature aftereffect can be obtained via tool-touch. IEEE Trans Haptics. 2014 Mar; 7(1):61-6. PMID: 24845746; DOI: 10.1109/TOH.2013.63;

Kibbe MM, Leslie AM. What's the object of object working memory in infancy? Unraveling 'what' and 'how many'. Cogn Psychol. 2013 Jun; 66(4):380-404. PMID: 23770623; DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2013.05.001;

Kibbe MM, Leslie AM. What do infants remember when they forget? Location and identity in 6-month-olds' memory for objects. Psychol Sci. 2011 Dec; 22(12):1500-5. PMID: 22095976; DOI: 10.1177/0956797611420165;

Kibbe MM, Kim SH, Cholewiak S, Denisova K. Curvature aftereffect and visual-haptic interactions in simulated environments. Journal of Vision. 2011; 11(11):784. View Publication

Kibbe MM, Kowler E. Visual search for category sets: tradeoffs between exploration and memory. J Vis. 2011; 11(3). PMID: 21421747; PMCID: PMC3519289; DOI: 10.1167/11.3.14;

This graph shows the total number of publications by year, by first, middle/unknown, or last author.

Bar chart showing 39 publications over 13 distinct years, with a maximum of 10 publications in 2023