Peter J. Marshall

I am a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple University in Philadelphia. My research examines the development of new abilities and ways of understanding the world, with a particular focus on infancy and early childhood.

Alongside this empirical work, I have become increasingly interested in broader questions about development, especially how new forms and abilities arise and how change unfolds without a predetermined outcome. This has also led me to think more about what is distinctive about living systems and the processes that sustain them.

About

I trained in zoology and developmental psychology at the University of Cambridge. My doctoral and postdoctoral work focused on temperament, attachment, early experience, and aspects of brain development. I spent several years at the University of Maryland before coming to Temple in 2004. From 2016 to 2026, I served as Chair of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple.

Temple University profile Google Scholar ORCID Curriculum Vitae
Research

Over the last two decades, my empirical work has examined how infants and young children act in the world and relate their own actions and experiences to those of other people. This work has included studies of action and imitation, neural body maps, and how infants’ developing abilities reveal broader changes in how they engage with the world. Another line of research examines how children interact with and learn from new technologies, including social robots and artificial intelligence.

Open Educational Resources

I have been developing two open educational resources for students and other interested readers. They begin from different questions, but increasingly overlap.

About Development

Development is often explained by listing the things that influence it: genes, environments, experience, culture. About Development steps back to ask what development itself involves, and how organized forms and abilities arise so reliably without assuming that they were specified in advance. It draws on developmental science, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the history of ideas about development.

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Enacting Life

Enacting Life introduces a biologically oriented perspective on how living things make sense of the world. It begins from the idea that the organism is not a passive receiver of information but an active, self-maintaining system whose ongoing activity shapes how it engages with its environment. The readings explore what this means for how we think about cognition, brains, development, and intelligence, including what comparisons with artificial systems can help clarify.

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Selected Writing

Some of my writing has addressed broader questions that have emerged from my research on development, including embodiment, biological organization, and the nature of developmental explanation. The selected papers and chapters below trace how that strand of my work has developed.