2026 Jessica A. Sommerville: Psychology Researcher – H-Index, Publications & Awards

Discipline name	D-Index	World Ranking	Current World Ranking	National Ranking	Current National Ranking	Publications	Citations
Psychology	36	9362	8751	636	596	94	8798

Overview

Jessica A. Sommerville is affiliated with the University of Toronto in Canada and specializes in the field of psychology, focusing primarily on developmental and educational psychology. Their body of research spans several interconnected subfields including social psychology, clinical psychology, experimental and cognitive psychology, and education.

Their work extensively covers topics related to child and animal learning development, neuroendocrine regulation and behavior, early childhood education and development, child and adolescent psychosocial and emotional development, evolutionary psychology and human behavior, evolutionary game theory and cooperation, and the psychology of moral and emotional judgment.

Jessica A. Sommerville has published research in a range of respected academic venues. Frequent publication venues include Frontiers in Psychology, Developmental Science, Cognition, Developmental Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology General.

Recent research contributions include:

Infants rationally decide when and how to deploy effort (2020, Nature Human Behaviour)
Toddlers' interventions toward fair and unfair individuals (2021, Cognition)
Infants' Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study (2024, Developmental Science)
A New Look at Infant Problem-Solving: Using DeepLabCut to Investigate Exploratory Problem-Solving Approaches (2021, Frontiers in Psychology)
Generalizing across moral sub-domains: infants bidirectionally link fairness and unfairness to helping and hindering (2023, Frontiers in Psychology)

The scientist frequently collaborates with a network of co-authors across multiple studies. Notable collaborators include Mia Radovanovic, Rachel Horton, Kelsey Lucca, Mark A. Schmuckler, and Talee Ziv.

Best Publications

Shared representations between self and other: a social cognitive neuroscience view.

Jean Decety;Jessica A. Sommerville

1421
Citations
Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions

Jessica A. Sommerville;Amanda L. Woodward;Amy Needham

1024
Citations
The neural bases of cooperation and competition: an fMRI investigation

Jean Decety;Philip L. Jackson;Jessica A. Sommerville;Thierry Chaminade

712
Citations
Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants

Marco F. H. Schmidt;Jessica A. Sommerville

694
Citations
Pulling out the intentional structure of action: the relation between action processing and action production in infancy.

Jessica A. Sommerville;Amanda L. Woodward

546
Citations
Twelve-Month-Old Infants Interpret Action in Context

Amanda L. Woodward;Jessica A. Sommerville

385
Citations
How infants make sense of intentional action.

Amanda L. Woodward;Jessica A. Sommerville;Jose J. Guajardo

377
Citations
The Development of Fairness Expectations and Prosocial Behavior in the Second Year of Life

Jessica A. Sommerville;Marco F H Schmidt;Jung Eun Yun;Monica Burns

295
Citations
Experience matters: The impact of doing versus watching on infants' subsequent perception of tool-use events.

Jessica A. Sommerville;Elina A. Hildebrand;Catharyn C. Crane

260
Citations
Weaving the fabric of social interaction: Articulating developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience in the domain of motor cognition

Jessica A. Sommerville;Jean Decety

245
Citations
Theory of mind through the ages: older and middle-aged adults exhibit more errors than do younger adults on a continuous false belief task.

Daniel M. Bernstein;Wendy Loken Thornton;Jessica A. Sommerville

195
Citations
Developmental Differences in Infants’ Fairness Expectations From 6 to 15 Months of Age

Talee Ziv;Jessica A. Sommerville

174
Citations
The emergence of intention attribution in infancy

Amanda L Woodward;Jessica A Sommerville;Sarah Gerson;Annette M E Henderson

158
Citations
"I pick you": the impact of fairness and race on infants' selection of social partners.

Monica Patricia Burns;Jessica Sommerville

150
Citations
God Does Not Play Dice: Causal Determinism and Preschoolers' Causal Inferences

Laura E. Schulz;Jessica Sommerville

147
Citations
Cognitive control factors in speech perception at 11 months.

Barbara T. Conboy;Jessica A. Sommerville;Patricia K. Kuhl

107
Citations
'To the victor go the spoils': Infants expect resources to align with dominance structures.

Elizabeth A. Enright;Hyowon Gweon;Jessica A. Sommerville

106
Citations
Fairness informs social decision making in infancy

Kelsey Lucca;Jacqueline Pospisil;Jessica A. Sommerville

99
Citations
Age-related changes in children's use of external representations.

Philip David Zelazo;Jessica A. Sommerville;Shana Nichols

98
Citations
Infants Associate Praise and Admonishment with Fair and Unfair Individuals.

Trent D. DesChamps;Arianne E. Eason;Jessica A. Sommerville

88
Citations

Frequent Co-Authors

Amanda L. Woodward University of Chicago

Jean Decety University of Chicago

Daniel M. Bernstein Kwantlen Polytechnic University

David M. Sobel Brown University

Philip David Zelazo University of Minnesota

J. Kiley Hamlin University of British Columbia

Patricia K. Kuhl University of Washington

Cheryl R. Kaiser University of Washington

Laura Schulz MIT

Andrew N. Meltzoff University of Washington

External Links

Personal website of Jessica A. Sommerville

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