User:HRShami/Melissa Koenig

Melissa Koenig is an American psychologist, researcher and educator. She is a Professor in the Institute of Child Development at University of Minnesota. She is President-elect of the Cognitive Development Society.

Koenig's research is focused on understanding the linguistic, cognitive and cultural factors that support children’s learning from others, as well as the concepts that make such learning possible in childhood. Her research is divided into three main areas: children’s testimonial learning; children’s social evaluations of an agent’s competence, reliability and morality; children’s foreign language learning. Her work also includes investigations of epistemic and moral virtue in infants and toddlers; examination of trust development in children at risk for maltreatment, and uncovering children’s sensitivity to a range of considerations, including interpersonal considerations of authority and responsibility.

She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Education
Koenig received a B.S. in Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1992. In 2002, she received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. Koenig completed her post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University from 2002 to 2004.

Career
In 2004, Koenig joined the University of Chicago as a Research Fellow, where she worked until 2007 when she joined University of Minnesota as an Assistant Professor. She became Associate Professor in 2011 and Full Professor in 2015. She briefly taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego before from 2015 to 2016.

Koenig has been the Associate Editor of Developmental Science since 2011. She was a Special Section Editor for Developmental Psychology's Special Issue on Social Learning from 2011 to 2013.

Research and work
Koenig's research is focused on understanding the linguistic, cognitive and cultural factors that support children’s learning from others, as well as the concepts that make such learning possible in childhood. Her research is divided into three main areas: children’s testimonial learning; children’s social evaluations of an agent’s competence, reliability and morality; children’s foreign language learning. Her work also includes investigations of epistemic and moral virtue in infants and toddlers; examination of trust development in children at risk for maltreatment, and uncovering children’s sensitivity to a range of considerations, including interpersonal considerations of authority and responsibility.

Children's testimonial learning
Koenig began research on children's testimonial learning as a graduate student. She found that 16 month-old infants directed more of their attention to speakers who misnamed objects than to the objects they misnamed. She discovered that when a person with access to the objects was responsible for the mistake, most infants corrected that speaker by stating the correct name. In three subsequent studies, infants did not exhibit this pattern when statements derived from an audio speaker (not a person) or when the person was turned away from the objects and looked elsewhere.

Koenig's later work in this area showed that infants distinguished accurate from inaccurate speakers, monitored the conditions that might explain their behavior, and adjusted their own learning decisions in response to speakers’ behavior. This work inspired more general interest in understanding how children distinguish knowledgeable from less knowledgeable sources of information more generally.

In her post-doctoral work with Paul Harris at Harvard University, she emphasized the role that testimony plays in children’s scientific and religious beliefs and discussed the "constructive role" children play in reworking and organizing the various pieces of testimony they receive.

At Harvard, she extended the infant work described above, and documented pre-schoolers’ ability to track the reliability of particular individuals, and to use that information to guide learning beyond the speaker’s domain of expertise. Some of her work in this area has examined children’s ability to make epistemic judgments based on the logical and pragmatic properties of a single utterance.

Children’s evaluations of others
A significant part of Koenig's work has been focused on understanding the nature of children’s epistemic inferences about a source of information. She has investigated situations in which mistakes are forgiven, and the ways in which children's evaluations of character and situation interact. In late 2010s, she investigated the influence of values expressed in the child’s local environment on their judgments.

Across several international and departmental collaborations, Koenig has investigated how children’s bases for trusting another person are tied to aspects of their testimonial environment. Her research has indicated that the more readily a child appeals to authority in their testimonial learning, the greater their vigilance will be when someone’s authority is undermined.

In 2014, in a collaboration with Michal Reifen Tagar, Koenig examined whether individual differences in parent authoritarianism would relate to differences in children’s vigilance toward unreliable informants. They found that children of highly authoritarian parents more frequently rejected information from nonconventional sources than children of less authoritarian parents. In later work, she examined how parents express authoritarian values and how such expressions influence children’s learning from speakers who vary in important epistemic dimensions.

In a series of studies in the moral and epistemic domains, Keonig and her colleagues pitted negatively- (and positively-) marked sources against neutral ones, and found that children indeed weigh negative information more heavily in their appraisals of human speakers.

Children’s foreign language learning
Keonig has also studied the ability of children to learn information in a second language. In collaboration with colleagues, she has conducted research on targeting the factors that facilitate or promote second language acquisition.

Koenig and her colleagues have investigated monolingual children’s capacity for learning words in a foreign language and whether they are sensitive to the boundaries between different languages. In a collaboration with Maria Sera and Caitlin Cole in 2014, she found that monolingual English preschoolers readily learn words for familiar objects in a foreign language, and that familiarity with the objects facilitates foreign word learning, especially for 3-year-olds.

Awards and honors

 * 2002 - American Psychological Association (APA) Dissertation Award
 * 2004 - Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, Harvard University
 * 2005 - NRSA Postdoctoral Award, University of Chicago
 * 2008, 2011, 2015 - International Research Award, OVPR, University of Minnesota
 * 2011 - New Career Excellence Award, University of Minnesota
 * 2012 - Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science
 * 2017 - Sara Evans Faculty Scholar and Leader Award

Selected articles

 * Clement, F., Koenig, M., & Harris, P. (2004). The Ontogenesis of Trust. Mind and Language, 19(4), 360-379.
 * Harris, P. L., & Koenig, M. A. (2006). Trust in Testimony: How Children Learn About Science and Religion. Child Development, 77(3), 505-524.
 * Koenig, M. A., Clement, F., & Harris, P. L. (2004). Trust in Testimony: Children's Use of True and False Statements. Psychological Science, 15(10), 694-698.
 * Koenig, M. A., & Echols, C. H. (2003). Infants' understanding of false labeling events: the referential roles of words and the speakers who use them. Cognition, 87(3), 179-208.
 * Koenig, M. A., & Harris, P. L. (2005). Preschoolers Mistrust Ignorant and Inaccurate Speakers. Child Development, 76(6), 1261-1277.
 * Koenig, M. A., & Harris, P. L. (2005). The role of social cognition in early trust. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(10), 457-459.
 * Koenig, M. A., & Harris, P. L. (2007). The Basis of Epistemic Trust: Reliable Testimony or Reliable Sources? Episteme, 4(3), 264-284.
 * Koenig, M. A., & Jaswal, V. K. (2011). Characterizing Children’s Expectations About Expertise and Incompetence: Halo or Pitchfork Effects? Child Development, 82(5), 1634-1647.
 * Koenig, M. A., & Woodward, A. L. (2010). Sensitivity of 24-month-olds to the prior inaccuracy of the source: Possible mechanisms. Developmental Psychology, 46(4), 815-826.
 * Pasquini, E. S., Corriveau, K. H., Koenig, M., & Harris, P. L. (2007). Preschoolers monitor the relative accuracy of informants. Developmental Psychology, 43(5), 1216-1226.