Rachel Keen

Rachel Keen (published under Rachel Keen Clifton from 1966-2002) was born in Burkesville, a small town in rural Kentucky. She received her B.A. from Berea College in 1959 and her doctorate from the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, in 1963. Her dissertation was on newborns’ discrimination and habituation to tones, using nonnutritive sucking as the response. She was awarded an NICHD postdoctoral fellowship to study newborn behavior using psychophysiological measures at the University of Wisconsin under the mentorship of Frances K. Graham.

One of the more startling discoveries made was that newborns remained habituated to auditory stimuli they had been exposed to 24 hours earlier (Keen, Chase, & Graham, 1965), a finding she replicated many years later using speech stimuli and a behavioral response rather than heart rate (Swain, Zelazo, & Clifton, 1993). Keen pursued a special aspect of auditory development in infants called the precedence effect. In addition to the research on audition, Keen studied the perception-action loop of vision and reaching in infants.

Honors for her research include the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for Research in Child Development, the Distinguished Alumna Award from Berea College, and the Distinguished Faculty Award from the University of Massachusetts. She received an honorary degree from Uppsala University, Sweden, and was elected fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and to the American Psychological Association. She held a Research Scientist Award from NIMH from 1981-2001, and a MERIT award from NICHD from 1999-2009.

Rachel Keen spent most of her career at the University of Massachusetts (1968-2007), and then at the University of Virginia (2007-2012), where she is now Professor Emeritus.