Thomas Suddendorf
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 149760 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Thomas Suddendorf |
| NOMBRES | Thomas |
| APELLIDO | Suddendorf |
| FIRMA | SUDDENDORF T |
| AFILIACIONES | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3328-7442 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 18 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 15 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 18 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2001 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Young children’s understanding of future utility
Recognition of future utility is a critical step in elevating a mere problem-solution into an innovation. It motivates us to engage in behaviors like keeping useful tools for repeated use, sharing them with others who need them, and refining their design—for instance—to maximize efficiency or durability. While previous research has assessed children’s capacity to use and create solutions to novel problems, we do not know when they become able to …
The role of foresight in the emergence of innovation
In the developmental and comparative literatures, innovation is generally defined as the capacity to generate novel problem-solutions. When conceived in this way, children demonstrate some competencies by the late preschool years and are increasingly capable from middle childhood onwards. Evidence of novel problem-solving is also seen in a variety of non-human animals. But when we instead consider innovation to be predicated on recognising the fu…
Perspectives on Time and Personality
The present paper aims to honor the memory of one of the most notable figures in psychological science over the past five decades, Philip G. Zimbardo, who sadly passed away in late 2024. To this end, we provide a multi‐perspective view on psychological time—a topic that deeply engaged Phil Zimbardo during the later stages of his prolific career. From the basic mechanisms of mental time travel to the experience of the passage of time, the phenomen…
A key to innovation
Innovation in children is typically studied by examining their capacity to independently create tools to solve problems. However, it has been argued that innovating requires more than creative problem-solving; it is essential that the future utility of a solution is recognized. Here, we examined children's capacity to recognize and construct a tool for future uses. Experiment 1 presented fifty-five 3- to 5-year-olds (28 girls) with a future-direc…
Children's emerging ability to balance internal and external cognitive resources
Australian children aged 6–9 years (N = 120, 71 females; data collected in 2021-2022) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups on different trials. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of tokens to allocate across trials, which they could use to mark target locations and assist future memory performance. Following the search period, children were invited to adjus…
Counterfactual choices and moral judgments in children
When making moral judgments of past actions, adults often think counterfactually about what could have been done differently. Considerable evidence suggests that counterfactual thinking emerges around age 6, but it remains unknown how this development influences children's moral judgments. Across two studies, Australian children aged 4–9 (N = 236, 142 Females) were told stories about two characters who had a choice that led to a good or bad outco…
Creativity and flexibility in young children's use of external cognitive strategies
A cardinal feature of adult cognition is the awareness of our own cognitive struggles and the capacity to draw upon this awareness to offload internal demand into the environment. In this preregistered study conducted in Australia, we investigated whether 3-8-year-olds ( N = 72, 36 male, 36 female, mostly White) could self-initiate such an external metacognitive strategy and transfer it across contexts. Children watched as an experimenter demonst…
What are the odds? Preschoolers’ ability to distinguish between possible, impossible, and probabilistically distinct future outcomes
Previous research has suggested that infants are able to distinguish between possible and impossible events and make basic probabilistic inferences. However, much of this research has focused on children's intuitions about past events for which the outcome is already determined but unknown. Here, we investigated children's ability to use probabilistic information to guide their choices and actively shape future events. In two experiments, we exam…
Does Neonatal Imitation Exist? Insights From a Meta-Analysis of 336 Effect Sizes
Neonatal imitation is a cornerstone in many theoretical accounts of human development and social behavior, yet its existence has been debated for the past 40 years. To examine possible explanations for the inconsistent findings in this body of research, we conducted a multilevel meta-analysis synthesizing 336 effect sizes from 33 independent samples of human newborns, reported in 26 articles. The meta-analysis found significant evidence for neona…
Mobile containers in human cognitive evolution studies
Mobile carrying devices—slings, bags, boxes, containers, etc.—are a ubiquitous tool form among recent human communities. So ingrained are they to our present lifeways that the fundamental relationship between mobile containers and foresight is easily overlooked, resulting in their significance in the study of human cognitive development being largely unrecognized. Exactly when this game‐changing innovation appeared and became an essential compone…
It's in the bag
Thinking about threats
Introduction to the special issue
Production of temporal terms by 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children
The evolution of foresight
In a dynamic world, mechanisms allowing prediction of future situations can provide a selective advantage. We suggest that memory systems differ in the degree of flexibility they offer for anticipatory behavior and put forward a corresponding taxonomy of prospection. The adaptive advantage of any memory system can only lie in what it contributes for future survival. The most flexible is episodic memory, which we suggest is part of a more general …
How primatology can inform us about the evolution of the human mind
Humans are primates. We have evolved from common ancestors and the evolution of the human body is becoming increasingly clear as the archeological record expands. But for most people the gap between humans and animals lies in the mind, not in the body. And minds do not fossilise. To reconstruct the evolution of mind, scholars have thus increasingly looked to our closest relatives for clues. Here I discuss four ways in which the study of primates …
Mental evolution and development
Recent interest in the development and evolution of theory of mind has provided a wealth of information about representational skills in both children and animals. According to J. Perner (1991), children begin to entertain secondary representations in the 2nd year of life. This advance manifests in their passing hidden displacement tasks, engaging in pretense and means-ends reasoning, interpreting external representations, displaying mirror self-…
If I could talk to the animals
It's in the bag
Mental evolution and development
Recent interest in the development and evolution of theory of mind has provided a wealth of information about representational skills in both children and animals. According to J. Perner (1991), children begin to entertain secondary representations in the 2nd year of life. This advance manifests in their passing hidden displacement tasks, engaging in pretense and means-ends reasoning, interpreting external representations, displaying mirror self-…
Production of temporal terms by 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children
Children's emerging ability to balance internal and external cognitive resources
Australian children aged 6–9 years (N = 120, 71 females; data collected in 2021-2022) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups on different trials. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of tokens to allocate across trials, which they could use to mark target locations and assist future memory performance. Following the search period, children were invited to adjus…
Creativity and flexibility in young children's use of external cognitive strategies
A cardinal feature of adult cognition is the awareness of our own cognitive struggles and the capacity to draw upon this awareness to offload internal demand into the environment. In this preregistered study conducted in Australia, we investigated whether 3-8-year-olds ( N = 72, 36 male, 36 female, mostly White) could self-initiate such an external metacognitive strategy and transfer it across contexts. Children watched as an experimenter demonst…
What are the odds? Preschoolers’ ability to distinguish between possible, impossible, and probabilistically distinct future outcomes
Previous research has suggested that infants are able to distinguish between possible and impossible events and make basic probabilistic inferences. However, much of this research has focused on children's intuitions about past events for which the outcome is already determined but unknown. Here, we investigated children's ability to use probabilistic information to guide their choices and actively shape future events. In two experiments, we exam…
Mental evolution and development
Recent interest in the development and evolution of theory of mind has provided a wealth of information about representational skills in both children and animals. According to J. Perner (1991), children begin to entertain secondary representations in the 2nd year of life. This advance manifests in their passing hidden displacement tasks, engaging in pretense and means-ends reasoning, interpreting external representations, displaying mirror self-…
How primatology can inform us about the evolution of the human mind
Humans are primates. We have evolved from common ancestors and the evolution of the human body is becoming increasingly clear as the archeological record expands. But for most people the gap between humans and animals lies in the mind, not in the body. And minds do not fossilise. To reconstruct the evolution of mind, scholars have thus increasingly looked to our closest relatives for clues. Here I discuss four ways in which the study of primates …
The evolution of foresight
In a dynamic world, mechanisms allowing prediction of future situations can provide a selective advantage. We suggest that memory systems differ in the degree of flexibility they offer for anticipatory behavior and put forward a corresponding taxonomy of prospection. The adaptive advantage of any memory system can only lie in what it contributes for future survival. The most flexible is episodic memory, which we suggest is part of a more general …
Production of temporal terms by 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children
Introduction to the special issue
Thinking about threats
Mobile containers in human cognitive evolution studies
Mobile carrying devices—slings, bags, boxes, containers, etc.—are a ubiquitous tool form among recent human communities. So ingrained are they to our present lifeways that the fundamental relationship between mobile containers and foresight is easily overlooked, resulting in their significance in the study of human cognitive development being largely unrecognized. Exactly when this game‐changing innovation appeared and became an essential compone…
It's in the bag
Does Neonatal Imitation Exist? Insights From a Meta-Analysis of 336 Effect Sizes
Neonatal imitation is a cornerstone in many theoretical accounts of human development and social behavior, yet its existence has been debated for the past 40 years. To examine possible explanations for the inconsistent findings in this body of research, we conducted a multilevel meta-analysis synthesizing 336 effect sizes from 33 independent samples of human newborns, reported in 26 articles. The meta-analysis found significant evidence for neona…
Counterfactual choices and moral judgments in children
When making moral judgments of past actions, adults often think counterfactually about what could have been done differently. Considerable evidence suggests that counterfactual thinking emerges around age 6, but it remains unknown how this development influences children's moral judgments. Across two studies, Australian children aged 4–9 (N = 236, 142 Females) were told stories about two characters who had a choice that led to a good or bad outco…
Creativity and flexibility in young children's use of external cognitive strategies
A cardinal feature of adult cognition is the awareness of our own cognitive struggles and the capacity to draw upon this awareness to offload internal demand into the environment. In this preregistered study conducted in Australia, we investigated whether 3-8-year-olds ( N = 72, 36 male, 36 female, mostly White) could self-initiate such an external metacognitive strategy and transfer it across contexts. Children watched as an experimenter demonst…
What are the odds? Preschoolers’ ability to distinguish between possible, impossible, and probabilistically distinct future outcomes
Previous research has suggested that infants are able to distinguish between possible and impossible events and make basic probabilistic inferences. However, much of this research has focused on children's intuitions about past events for which the outcome is already determined but unknown. Here, we investigated children's ability to use probabilistic information to guide their choices and actively shape future events. In two experiments, we exam…
If I could talk to the animals
Children's emerging ability to balance internal and external cognitive resources
Australian children aged 6–9 years (N = 120, 71 females; data collected in 2021-2022) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups on different trials. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of tokens to allocate across trials, which they could use to mark target locations and assist future memory performance. Following the search period, children were invited to adjus…
Young children’s understanding of future utility
Recognition of future utility is a critical step in elevating a mere problem-solution into an innovation. It motivates us to engage in behaviors like keeping useful tools for repeated use, sharing them with others who need them, and refining their design—for instance—to maximize efficiency or durability. While previous research has assessed children’s capacity to use and create solutions to novel problems, we do not know when they become able to …
The role of foresight in the emergence of innovation
In the developmental and comparative literatures, innovation is generally defined as the capacity to generate novel problem-solutions. When conceived in this way, children demonstrate some competencies by the late preschool years and are increasingly capable from middle childhood onwards. Evidence of novel problem-solving is also seen in a variety of non-human animals. But when we instead consider innovation to be predicated on recognising the fu…
Perspectives on Time and Personality
The present paper aims to honor the memory of one of the most notable figures in psychological science over the past five decades, Philip G. Zimbardo, who sadly passed away in late 2024. To this end, we provide a multi‐perspective view on psychological time—a topic that deeply engaged Phil Zimbardo during the later stages of his prolific career. From the basic mechanisms of mental time travel to the experience of the passage of time, the phenomen…
A key to innovation
Innovation in children is typically studied by examining their capacity to independently create tools to solve problems. However, it has been argued that innovating requires more than creative problem-solving; it is essential that the future utility of a solution is recognized. Here, we examined children's capacity to recognize and construct a tool for future uses. Experiment 1 presented fifty-five 3- to 5-year-olds (28 girls) with a future-direc…
Psychology (14 obras) · Child and Animal Learning Development (12 obras) · Cognition (9 obras) · Developmental psychology (8 obras) · Cognitive psychology (7 obras) · Cognitive science (7 obras) · Computer Science (7 obras) · Social Psychology (7 obras) · Neuroscience (6 obras) · Cognitive development (4 obras)