Jessica A Sommerville
Biographic Data
| ID | 1463470 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jessica A Sommerville |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jessica A |
| FAMILY NAME | Sommerville |
| SIGNATURE | SOMMERVILLE J A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8290-254X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Origins of understanding fair resource collection
Concerns about fair resource exchanges are pervasive across development. However, existing work has focused primarily on resource distributions. The present experiments investigated whether 14- to 17-month-old North American infants demonstrate expectations for fair resource collection events, in contrast to expectations for resource distribution events. We found that infants' expectations for equal resource collections emerged by 16 months of ag…
Not just if, but how much
Children’s inferences of moral character across different moral subdomains
Adults use an individual's behavior in one moral subdomain to make inferences about how they will act in another moral subdomain, reflecting a tendency to attribute underlying traits to individuals. We recruited 4- to 7-year-old children from a large city in North America to investigate their ability to generalize from one moral subdomain to another and integrate these pieces of information to form trust and friendship decisions, focusing on the …
It takes two
Process praise (i.e., praise for effort) facilitates childhood persistence. However, less is known about the mechanism by which process praise influences persistence in infancy. Here, we propose that well-timed process praise reinforces the link between effort and success, thus promoting persistence in young children. In Experiment 1, U.S. infants aged 17-18 months old ( N = 29; 13 females; M age = 18 months, 3 days; 76% White) and in Experiment …
Toddlers' interventions toward fair and unfair individuals
Infants rationally decide when and how to deploy effort
Underrepresentation and the Perception of Others’ Racial Attitudes
Across two experiments, we investigate racial attitude perceptions in low-diversity environments to explore whether friendships with members of numerically underrepresented groups serve as a stronger indication of individuals’ racial attitudes than friendships with members of the numeric majority. Children aged 7–10 years heard about a Black (Experiment 1) or White (Experiment 2) protagonist befriending two classmates who belonged to either the n…
That’s not fair
The ability to distinguish between mere equality in resource distributions and fairness based on a broader range of contextual factors is of paramount importance in social decision making and is a critical component of morality. Children's developmental shift from viewing inequality as a dichotomous moral issue toward a more nuanced understanding of partial inequality has been well documented across middle childhood and is attributed to a host of…
Developmental Change in Action Perception
Human actions are complex stimuli containing several perceptual dimensions an observer could attend to. Research indicates that attention to the perceptual dimensions of action undergoes a process of perceptual narrowing between 4 and 10 months, during which infants’ attention to configural and temporal information in action decreases over time, while attention to hand information is maintained. This research explored whether infants’ active expe…
The choice is yours
Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test…
A Survey of Common Practices in Infancy Research
Psychology is currently in a period of unprecedented self‐reflection, with particular attention being paid to research practices and policies. Although infancy researchers have a history of attending to research practice in the form of papers outlining how to best implement various methods and paradigms, less is known about the particular practices currently being used by researchers in the field, making it difficult to identify areas for improve…
Infants Associate Praise and Admonishment with Fair and Unfair Individuals
Recent evidence suggests that infants possess a rudimentary sensitivity to fairness: Infants expect resources to be distributed fairly and equally, and prefer individuals that distribute resources fairly over those that do so unfairly. The goal of this work was to determine whether infants' evaluations of fair and unfair individuals also includes an understanding that fair individuals are worthy of praise and unfair individuals are worthy of admo…
Experience facilitates the emergence of sharing behavior among 7.5-month-old infants
Given the centrality of prosociality in everyday social functioning, understanding the factors and mechanisms underlying the origins of prosocial development is of critical importance. This experiment investigated whether experience with reciprocal object exchanges can drive the developmental onset of sharing behavior. Seven-month-old infants took part in 2 laboratory visits to assess their sharing behavior and ability to release objects. During …
The Development of Fairness Expectations and Prosocial Behavior in the Second Year of Life
Recent work provides evidence that expectations regarding a fair (i.e., equal) distribution of goods and resources arise sometime in the second year of life. To investigate the developmental trajectory of fairness expectations, and their potential relation to prosocial behavior, infants participated in a violation‐of‐expectancy (VOE) paradigm designed to assess expectations regarding how resources are typically distributed, and in a sharing task,…
Disentangling embodied and symbolic modes of social understanding
Becoming a social agent
In this paper, we argue that young infants serve as ideal models for disentangling the relative contributions of embodied and symbolic processes to mature social cognition and behavior. Based on evidence suggesting that infants possess a nascent ability to understand others' actions, and to interact and communicate with others in meaningful ways, we argue that the embodiment processes underlying these skills in infancy may also account for a sign…
Cognitive control factors in speech perception at 11 months
The development of speech perception during the 1st year reflects increasing attunement to native language features, but the mechanisms underlying this development are not completely understood. One previous study linked reductions in nonnative speech discrimination to performance on nonlinguistic tasks, whereas other studies have shown associations between speech perception and vocabulary growth. The present study examined relationships among th…
Experience matters
Prior work suggests that active experience affects infants' understanding of simple actions. The present studies compared the impact of active and observational experience on infants' ability to identify the goal of a novel tool-use event. Infants either received active training and practice in using a cane to retrieve an out-of-reach toy or had matched observational experience before taking part in a habituation paradigm that we used to assess i…
Treating another's actions as one's own
Children often overestimate their contribution to collaborative activities. Across 2 studies, the authors investigated whether this memory bias supports internalization of the actions of others in the context of joint exchanges. After taking turns with (high collaborative condition; Studies 1 and 2) or working independently of (low collaborative condition; Study 2) an adult experimenter to create a series of novel toys, children's agent memory an…
Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions
Infants' Sensitivity to the Causal Features of Means-End Support Sequences in Action and Perception
Current work has yielded differential findings regarding infants' ability to perceptually detect the causal structure of a means-end support sequence. Resolving this debate has important implications for perception-action dissociations in this domain of object knowledge. In Study 1, 12-month-old infants' ability to perceive the causal structure of a cloth-pulling sequence was assessed via a habituation paradigm. After seeing an event in which a s…
Shared representations between self and other
Age-related changes in children's use of external representations
This study explored children's use of external representations. Experiment 1 focused on representations of self: Self-recognition was assessed by a mark test as a function of age (3 vs. 4 years), delay (5 s vs. 3 min), and media (photographs vs. drawings). Four-year-olds outperformed 3-year-olds; children performed better with photographs than drawings; and there was no effect of delay. In Experiment 2, 3- and 4-year-olds used a delayed video ima…
Experience matters
Prior work suggests that active experience affects infants' understanding of simple actions. The present studies compared the impact of active and observational experience on infants' ability to identify the goal of a novel tool-use event. Infants either received active training and practice in using a cane to retrieve an out-of-reach toy or had matched observational experience before taking part in a habituation paradigm that we used to assess i…
Cognitive control factors in speech perception at 11 months
The development of speech perception during the 1st year reflects increasing attunement to native language features, but the mechanisms underlying this development are not completely understood. One previous study linked reductions in nonnative speech discrimination to performance on nonlinguistic tasks, whereas other studies have shown associations between speech perception and vocabulary growth. The present study examined relationships among th…
Treating another's actions as one's own
Children often overestimate their contribution to collaborative activities. Across 2 studies, the authors investigated whether this memory bias supports internalization of the actions of others in the context of joint exchanges. After taking turns with (high collaborative condition; Studies 1 and 2) or working independently of (low collaborative condition; Study 2) an adult experimenter to create a series of novel toys, children's agent memory an…
That’s not fair
The ability to distinguish between mere equality in resource distributions and fairness based on a broader range of contextual factors is of paramount importance in social decision making and is a critical component of morality. Children's developmental shift from viewing inequality as a dichotomous moral issue toward a more nuanced understanding of partial inequality has been well documented across middle childhood and is attributed to a host of…
Becoming a social agent
In this paper, we argue that young infants serve as ideal models for disentangling the relative contributions of embodied and symbolic processes to mature social cognition and behavior. Based on evidence suggesting that infants possess a nascent ability to understand others' actions, and to interact and communicate with others in meaningful ways, we argue that the embodiment processes underlying these skills in infancy may also account for a sign…
Age-related changes in children's use of external representations
This study explored children's use of external representations. Experiment 1 focused on representations of self: Self-recognition was assessed by a mark test as a function of age (3 vs. 4 years), delay (5 s vs. 3 min), and media (photographs vs. drawings). Four-year-olds outperformed 3-year-olds; children performed better with photographs than drawings; and there was no effect of delay. In Experiment 2, 3- and 4-year-olds used a delayed video ima…
Infants rationally decide when and how to deploy effort
The choice is yours
Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test…
Experience facilitates the emergence of sharing behavior among 7.5-month-old infants
Given the centrality of prosociality in everyday social functioning, understanding the factors and mechanisms underlying the origins of prosocial development is of critical importance. This experiment investigated whether experience with reciprocal object exchanges can drive the developmental onset of sharing behavior. Seven-month-old infants took part in 2 laboratory visits to assess their sharing behavior and ability to release objects. During …
Age-related changes in children's use of external representations
This study explored children's use of external representations. Experiment 1 focused on representations of self: Self-recognition was assessed by a mark test as a function of age (3 vs. 4 years), delay (5 s vs. 3 min), and media (photographs vs. drawings). Four-year-olds outperformed 3-year-olds; children performed better with photographs than drawings; and there was no effect of delay. In Experiment 2, 3- and 4-year-olds used a delayed video ima…
Shared representations between self and other
Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions
Infants' Sensitivity to the Causal Features of Means-End Support Sequences in Action and Perception
Current work has yielded differential findings regarding infants' ability to perceptually detect the causal structure of a means-end support sequence. Resolving this debate has important implications for perception-action dissociations in this domain of object knowledge. In Study 1, 12-month-old infants' ability to perceive the causal structure of a cloth-pulling sequence was assessed via a habituation paradigm. After seeing an event in which a s…
Treating another's actions as one's own
Children often overestimate their contribution to collaborative activities. Across 2 studies, the authors investigated whether this memory bias supports internalization of the actions of others in the context of joint exchanges. After taking turns with (high collaborative condition; Studies 1 and 2) or working independently of (low collaborative condition; Study 2) an adult experimenter to create a series of novel toys, children's agent memory an…
Cognitive control factors in speech perception at 11 months
The development of speech perception during the 1st year reflects increasing attunement to native language features, but the mechanisms underlying this development are not completely understood. One previous study linked reductions in nonnative speech discrimination to performance on nonlinguistic tasks, whereas other studies have shown associations between speech perception and vocabulary growth. The present study examined relationships among th…
Experience matters
Prior work suggests that active experience affects infants' understanding of simple actions. The present studies compared the impact of active and observational experience on infants' ability to identify the goal of a novel tool-use event. Infants either received active training and practice in using a cane to retrieve an out-of-reach toy or had matched observational experience before taking part in a habituation paradigm that we used to assess i…
Disentangling embodied and symbolic modes of social understanding
Becoming a social agent
In this paper, we argue that young infants serve as ideal models for disentangling the relative contributions of embodied and symbolic processes to mature social cognition and behavior. Based on evidence suggesting that infants possess a nascent ability to understand others' actions, and to interact and communicate with others in meaningful ways, we argue that the embodiment processes underlying these skills in infancy may also account for a sign…
The Development of Fairness Expectations and Prosocial Behavior in the Second Year of Life
Recent work provides evidence that expectations regarding a fair (i.e., equal) distribution of goods and resources arise sometime in the second year of life. To investigate the developmental trajectory of fairness expectations, and their potential relation to prosocial behavior, infants participated in a violation‐of‐expectancy (VOE) paradigm designed to assess expectations regarding how resources are typically distributed, and in a sharing task,…
Infants Associate Praise and Admonishment with Fair and Unfair Individuals
Recent evidence suggests that infants possess a rudimentary sensitivity to fairness: Infants expect resources to be distributed fairly and equally, and prefer individuals that distribute resources fairly over those that do so unfairly. The goal of this work was to determine whether infants' evaluations of fair and unfair individuals also includes an understanding that fair individuals are worthy of praise and unfair individuals are worthy of admo…
Experience facilitates the emergence of sharing behavior among 7.5-month-old infants
Given the centrality of prosociality in everyday social functioning, understanding the factors and mechanisms underlying the origins of prosocial development is of critical importance. This experiment investigated whether experience with reciprocal object exchanges can drive the developmental onset of sharing behavior. Seven-month-old infants took part in 2 laboratory visits to assess their sharing behavior and ability to release objects. During …
A Survey of Common Practices in Infancy Research
Psychology is currently in a period of unprecedented self‐reflection, with particular attention being paid to research practices and policies. Although infancy researchers have a history of attending to research practice in the form of papers outlining how to best implement various methods and paradigms, less is known about the particular practices currently being used by researchers in the field, making it difficult to identify areas for improve…
Developmental Change in Action Perception
Human actions are complex stimuli containing several perceptual dimensions an observer could attend to. Research indicates that attention to the perceptual dimensions of action undergoes a process of perceptual narrowing between 4 and 10 months, during which infants’ attention to configural and temporal information in action decreases over time, while attention to hand information is maintained. This research explored whether infants’ active expe…
The choice is yours
Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test…
Underrepresentation and the Perception of Others’ Racial Attitudes
Across two experiments, we investigate racial attitude perceptions in low-diversity environments to explore whether friendships with members of numerically underrepresented groups serve as a stronger indication of individuals’ racial attitudes than friendships with members of the numeric majority. Children aged 7–10 years heard about a Black (Experiment 1) or White (Experiment 2) protagonist befriending two classmates who belonged to either the n…
That’s not fair
The ability to distinguish between mere equality in resource distributions and fairness based on a broader range of contextual factors is of paramount importance in social decision making and is a critical component of morality. Children's developmental shift from viewing inequality as a dichotomous moral issue toward a more nuanced understanding of partial inequality has been well documented across middle childhood and is attributed to a host of…
Infants rationally decide when and how to deploy effort
Toddlers' interventions toward fair and unfair individuals
Not just if, but how much
Children’s inferences of moral character across different moral subdomains
Adults use an individual's behavior in one moral subdomain to make inferences about how they will act in another moral subdomain, reflecting a tendency to attribute underlying traits to individuals. We recruited 4- to 7-year-old children from a large city in North America to investigate their ability to generalize from one moral subdomain to another and integrate these pieces of information to form trust and friendship decisions, focusing on the …
It takes two
Process praise (i.e., praise for effort) facilitates childhood persistence. However, less is known about the mechanism by which process praise influences persistence in infancy. Here, we propose that well-timed process praise reinforces the link between effort and success, thus promoting persistence in young children. In Experiment 1, U.S. infants aged 17-18 months old ( N = 29; 13 females; M age = 18 months, 3 days; 76% White) and in Experiment …
Origins of understanding fair resource collection
Concerns about fair resource exchanges are pervasive across development. However, existing work has focused primarily on resource distributions. The present experiments investigated whether 14- to 17-month-old North American infants demonstrate expectations for fair resource collection events, in contrast to expectations for resource distribution events. We found that infants' expectations for equal resource collections emerged by 16 months of ag…
Psychology (22 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (20 works) · Developmental psychology (17 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Cognitive psychology (11 works) · Action Observation and Synchronization (8 works) · Cognition (6 works) · Perception (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Computer Science (4 works)