Nora S. Newcombe (born 1951 in Toronto) is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and the James H. Glackin Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Temple University.

[6] She continued her education at Harvard University, receiving a Ph.D. in psychology in 1976 under the supervision of Jerome Kagan.

At Harvard, Newcombe collaborated with Barbara Rogoff and Kagan on studies of the development of recognition memory.

[22] Her 2003 book Making Space, co-authored with Janellen Huttenlocher, synthesized decades of research and provided a new direction for the field, and provided a new conceptualization of cognitive development different from either traditional nativist or from traditional empiricist approaches.

Since then, she has recognized the evolutionary and neural factors involved in sex differences while also emphasizing the malleability of cognitive ability as noted in the literature.