Bornstein, Marc H.

Marc H. Bornstein is probably best known for his research on parenting and children's development around the world. Few people (particularly the younger generation) may realize that he began his research career by studying perception and perceptual development in infants, in particular infants' perception of color (e.g., Bornstein, 1978). But a good research program raises more questions than it answers. In laboratory-based studies on infant habituation, Bornstein noticed that, other things being equal, infants habituated in different patterns and at different rates. This observation led him to question the origins of these individual differences, and he turned to infants' experiences (beyond their genetic endowment) as one likely source. As he wrote in the Handbook of Parenting,

This deduction led in two intertwined research directions. The first concerned aspects of infants' experiences with parents and family life. The second concerned infants' development of mental representation, which gradually expanded to the study of infants' cognitive competencies more generally. What he learned from this early work was the importance of experience and environment to infant development. Bornstein's research eventually broadened beyond his local community to include multiple sociodemo-graphic groups and multiple cultures (Bornstein, 2002c), and grew into an investigation of patterns of parent-child interaction and their developmental sequelae for children in diverse sociodemographic and cultural contexts (e.g., Bornstein & Cote, 2001; Bornstein, Hahn, Suwalsky, & Haynes, 2003; Bornstein, Selmi, Haynes, Painter, & Marx, 1999; Bornstein & Tamis-LeMonda, 1990).

Marc H. Bornstein was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and educated at the Boston Latin School. He received his BA from Columbia College, majoring in psychology. He completed both his MS and PhD in psychology at Yale University. His mentors at Yale were the well-known psychophysicist Lawrence Marks and developmental psychologist William Kessen. During his doctoral training, Bornstein was a Yale University Fellow, a U.S. Public Health Service Trainee, and in addition, he was a Yale University Prize Teaching Fellow. At Yale, Bornstein actually conducted two PhD studies in psychology. During the daytime he undertook a study of infant color vision, and during the nighttime he studied retinal psychophysics. Eventually the infant studies won out. After completing his doctoral training, Bornstein was a visiting scientist with the Czech pediatrician Hanuu Papousek at the Max-Planck-Institut für Psychiatrie in [Page 171]Germany, and he later returned to Yale as a U.S. Public Health Service Postdoctoral Research Fellow to pursue his investigation of infant color vision.

Bornstein's first academic appointment was to the faculty at Princeton University. While at Princeton, Bornstein was awarded the B. R. McCandless Young Scientist Award by the American Psychological Association's Division of Developmental Psychology in recognition of his outstanding research in the field of developmental psychology. During his tenure at Princeton, Bornstein furthered his research on infant perception and cognition, including studies of symmetry and other perceptual processes, and broadened this research developmentally (to studies of children, adults, and the aged) as well as substantively (to other fields within cognitive psychology like memory and information processing, as well as to parent-child interaction).

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