Michael Miller, Ph.D.

Dissertation:“Self-Explanation and Planning: A Microgenetic Study of Preschoolers' Strategy Use on the Tower of Hanoi”

Program affiliation: Lifespan development

Supervisor: Dr. Ulrich Mueller

Current position: Postdoctoral Fellow - Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University

Research interests

My research interests are focused around the relations, causes, and consequences of cognitive and social development in early childhood. At UVic, my Master’s thesis examined the relation between gender role development and social understanding in 5- to 7-year-olds, and my Doctoral dissertation investigated the development of preschoolers’ planning and strategy use on an executive function problem-solving task. Since graduating from UVic in 2011, I have been working as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Bethany Rittle-Johnson at Vanderbilt University. My research at Vanderbilt focuses on young children’s knowledge of patterns and mathematics. Other research interests of mine include children’s school readiness, analogical reasoning, self-regulation, emotion regulation, and humour development.

Representative publications:

Miller, M. R., Giesbrecht, G. F., Müller, U., McInerney, R. J., & Kerns, K. A. (in press). A latent variable approach to determining the structure of executive function in preschool children. Journal of Cognition and Development.

Giesbrecht, G. F., Miller, M. R., & Müller, U. (2010). The anger-distress model of temper tantrums: Associations with emotional reactivity and emotional competence. Infant & Child Development, 19, 478-497.

Giesbrecht, G. F., Müller, U., & Miller, M. R. (2010). Psychological distancing in the development of executive function and emotion regulation. In B. W. Sokol, U. Müller, J. I. M. Carpendale, A. R. Young, & G. Iarocci (Eds.), Self- and social-regulation: Social interaction and the development of social understanding and executive functions (pp. 337-357). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Müller, U., Miller, M. R., Michalczyk, K., & Karapinka, A. (2007). False belief understanding: The influence of person, grammatical mood, counterfactual reasoning, and working memory. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 25, 615-632.