John H. Flavell

I am a developmental psychologist, specializing in children's cognitive development. My subspecialty is "theory-of-mind" development -- the acquisition during childhood of knowledge or beliefs about the mind. Current research in this area investigates the development of children's knowledge about ongoing mental experience -- knowledge that the mind is spontaneously active even when the person is not doing any mental task, that the mind does different things when the person is conscious versus unconscious, and that the mind's activity is not completely under a person's control.