Stephanie M. Carlson

Stephanie M. Carlson is an American developmental psychologist whose research has contributed to scientific understanding of the development of children's executive function skills, including psychometrics and the key roles of imagination and distancing.

Carlson is Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, and co-founder of Reflection Sciences, Inc.

Association (Division 7, Developmental), where she received a Dissertation Research Award (1995)

and the Ainsworth Award for Excellence in Developmental Science (2022).

In 2023-24, she received

a James McKeen Cattell award for her sabbatical at Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

She has been a Scientific Advisor to Transforming Education, the Minnesota Children's Museum, Playworks Minnesota, Understood.org, Sesame Workshop, Noggin, and Bright Horizons

Family Solutions.

Professor Carlson is a graduate of Bucknell University (summa cum laude), and obtained her Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Oregon in 1997, where she studied with Marjorie Taylor, Lou Moses, Dare Baldwin, Mary Rothbart, and Michael Posner.

From 1998 to 2007, she was assistant and then associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

In 2007, she moved to the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, where she co-directs (with Philip David Zelazo) the Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory.

She was promoted to professor in 2013, and named Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 2017.

In 2014, Carlson and Zelazo co-founded a university-based start-up company, Reflection Sciences, Inc., to disseminate information about executive function skills and provide tools for assessing those skills and promoting their healthy development.

In 2021, Carlson and Zelazo co-founded Reflective Performance, Inc., to measure and develop executive function skills for the adult work force.

Measurement of executive function in early childhood

Professor Carlson has made major contributions to the assessment of executive function skills in very young children, including the Less is More task, and the creation of the Minnesota Executive Function Scale (MEFS), a tablet-based direct assessment that is standardized, reliable, validated, normed, and suitable for children ages 2 years and up.

This work stemmed from her influential research investigating the relation between executive function and theory of mind in young children.

Early experience and the development of executive function skills

Professor Carlson's research has examined how variations in early experiences relate to later differences in the development of executive function skills.

Children with better executive function skills (independent of intelligence) generally have higher quality sleep in infancy, receive more autonomy-supportive parenting from both mothers and fathers, receive non-punitive discipline, and are raised bilingual.

In contrast, children with worse executive function skills are more likely to have a history of deprived care, such as experience in orphanages, and prenatal exposure to alcohol.

The Batman effect

Carlson's work has shown how imagination and symbolization contribute to children's developing decision-making skills.

Together with former students Rachel White and Emily Prager, and colleagues Angela Duckworth and Ethan Kross, Carlson has shown that asking children to role-play as if they were an exemplary character (e.g., Batman), which creates psychological distance, increases kindergarten children's executive function scores by the equivalent of 1 year of development, and helps them to resist a tempting video game and persist longer at tasks.

Carlson is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological

Carlson delivered a TEDx Minneapolis talk about executive function skills in 2020.