Jennifer Van Reet
Assistant Professor
Degrees
Ph.D., Psychology (specialization: developmental), University of Virginia
B.A., Psychology and Plan II, University of Texas at Austin
Courses Taught
Research Methods and Statistical Analysis I & II (PSY 201-202)
Child Psychology (PSY 312)
Psychology of Adolescence (PSY 313)
Research in Psychology (PSY 395)
Experimental Child Psychology (PSY 406)
Advanced Cognitive Development (PSY 488)
Independent Study (PSY 490)
Research Interests
I am primarily interested in how people mentally represent entities and events that are not real and how this ability develops over the course of childhood and into adulthood. I am currently investigating the role of inhibitory control in the ability to pretend and understand pretend actions. I am also interested in how people make decisions about what is real or trustworthy. In collaboration with Dr. David Sobel at Brown University, we are testing whether children's prior knowledge about pretending influences their learning about a novel pretend action.
Selected Publications
Sheehan, K. J., Van Reet, J., & Bloom, C. (2012). Measuring preschoolers’ superstitious tendencies. Behavioral Processes.
Van Reet, J. (2012). Learning in play: Procedural versus declarative knowledge. In Pinkham, A. M., Kaefer, T., & Neuman, S. (Eds.), Knowledge Development in Early Childhood. New York, NY: Guilford Publications.
Woodard, C.R., & Van Reet, J. (2011). Object identification and imagination: An alternative to the meta-representational explanation of autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 41(2), 213-226.
Van Reet, J., Pinkham, A. M., & Lillard, A. S. (2007). The development of the counterfactual imagination. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30(5), 468.
Woolley, J. D. & Van Reet, J. (2006). Effects of context on judgments concerning the reality status of novel entities. Child Development, 77, 1778-1793.
Selected Presentations
Van Reet, J., McInnis, C., & Fast, A. (2012, May). Measuring the Representation of Pretend Object Substitutions. Poster presented at the meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Chicago, IL.
Van Reet, J., & Bogueszewski, K. (2011, October). Specifying the relationship between pretense and inhibitory control in preschoolers. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Cognitive Development Society, Philadelphia, PA.
Van Reet, J. (2011, May). Inhibitory control facilitates pretense quality in young preschoolers. Poster presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Society, Washington D.C.
Sheehan, K., & Van Reet, J. (2011, May). Children’s superstitious tendencies: Three to 5 year- old’s illusory associations on a touch-screen task. Poster presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Society, Washington D.C.
Van Reet, J., Pinkham, A. M., & Lillard, A. S. (2011, April). Less is sometimes more: Reasoning about ontological status in middle childhood. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal, Canada.
Van Reet, J. (2011, March). The role of inhibitory control in young children’s contrary-to-fact reasoning. Poster presented at the meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Cambridge, MA.