Faculty Expert Profile

Amy Shelton is the director of research for the Center for Talented Youth (CTY) and a professor and associate dean for research in the School of Education. In 2019 she published an op-ed in The Baltimore Sun explaining how the CTY changed tactics to to identify high-potential students from low-income Baltimore neighborhoods after acknowledging that the traditional testing formula suffered from pronounced socioeconomic and cultural bias.

Shelton holds a joint appointment in the School of Medicine and serves on the steering committees for the university-wide Science of Learning Initiative. Shelton was on the faculty in psychological and brain sciences from 2002-2013 before assuming the joint position with CTY and the School of Education. She also serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and on the editorial board for Spatial Cognition and Computation.

She is affiliated with a number of different professional organizations in psychology, neuroscience, and education. Her research in cognitive psychology/cognitive neuroscience focuses on spatial skills, individual differences, and mechanisms of learning. Shelton’s professional orientation takes a strong basic science approach that is informed by the problems and questions of practice and application.

In one recent paper, Shelton gives a brief historical and theoretical overview of general intelligence, describes its relationship to contemporary measurement techniques, and discusses the challenges of defining such intelligence from a genetic perspective.