Dr. Alice Wilder Biography

Mary Ann Foley, Ph.D., and Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology and Tisch Learning Center at Skidmore College may have had a hand in forever changing children's television in the U.S. during the fall semester of 1984.

That was when Alice Wilder, then a freshman at Skidmore College, took a course taught by Professor Foley entitled, Autobiographical Memories. The course focused mainly on memory and cognition.

Up until that point in her academic career, Wilder was a self-described "lifelong C student," and "never found school all that interesting." But in the fall of 1984, Professor Foley called Wilder into her office and forever changed her life path.

She proceeded to tell Wilder that she really liked her questions in class and was wondering whether she would be interested in working in her memory and cognition lab at Skidmore. "No one had ever said they liked anything about the way I thought about things. That was so new and cool to me," explains Wilder.

Wilder's experience in the lab opened up a whole new area of interest to her—namely, figuring out the way people think and what they think—especially children.

From her earliest memories into adulthood, Wilder always enjoyed being around children. Like the movie Big, she recalls, "I wanted to be the adult that thought like a kid and said unequivocally, what's so fun about that?"

Wilder went on to produce and run the research and development efforts for Nick Jr.'s groundbreaking preschool television series Blue's Clues, and serve as the developer of Blue's Room. She's been nominated for Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Preschool Children's Series as well as Outstanding Writing in a Children's Series. Her innovative approach to research with children was cited in Malcom Gladwell's bestselling book, The Tipping Point.

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