Peter J. Marshall
I am a developmental psychologist and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple University.
Much of my work has led me back to basic questions about development itself. What counts as a developmental explanation? How do new forms and capacities come into being? And how should we think about development when it is not simply the path toward an already specified outcome?
This site brings together some of the things I have been working on, including two open educational resources and related writing.
I trained in zoology and developmental psychology at the University of Cambridge, then spent several years at the University of Maryland before coming to Temple in 2004. I spent 2014–15 as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington.
I have been developing two open educational resources for students and other interested readers. They begin from different questions, but they increasingly intersect.
About Development
Development is often explained by listing the things that influence it: genes, environments, experience, culture. About Development starts with a different question: how do organized forms actually arise, recur, and change? It draws on developmental science, biology, neuroscience, and the history of ideas about development.
Visit About Development →Enacting Life
Enacting Life begins with a simple but difficult question: what is different about a living thing? It follows one biological strand of enactivism into questions about cognition, the brain, meaning, and artificial intelligence.
Visit Enacting Life →Alongside my empirical research, I have maintained a longstanding interest in conceptual questions about development, embodiment, and biological organization. These are some of the papers in which I have addressed those questions most directly.
- Psychology in 2125: A Developmental Science of Living Sense-Making Perspectives on Psychological Science, forthcoming · preprint
- Towards a Biologically Coherent Account of the Brain and How It Develops Human Development, 2024 · preprint
- The Shared Origins of Embodiment and Development with Troy Houser and Staci M. Weiss · Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2021
- Embodiment and Human Development Child Development Perspectives, 2016
- Beyond Different Levels: Embodiment and the Developmental System Frontiers in Psychology, 2014
My current empirical work continues through the Developmental Science Lab at Temple. Recent projects include infant body representations and anticipation, the development of reaching and grasping, and ways of combining naturalistic video with computational methods for studying development.
The lab site has information about current research, people, participation, and our work with infants and families.
Developmental Science Lab →