John H. Flavell

John Hurley Flavell (1928 to 2025) was an American developmental psychologist who specialised in how children come to understand thinking, and he is widely credited with founding the study of metacognition and metamemory. Born in Rockland, Massachusetts, he trained in clinical psychology at Clark University, taught at Rochester and Minnesota, and from 1976 was a professor at Stanford University, where he became the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor, emeritus. His 1963 book The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget introduced Piaget to English readers and is regarded as the start of the modern science of cognitive development. His later experiments on the difference between appearance and reality, on perspective taking and on children early grasp of the mind showed that most three-year-olds fail tasks that five-year-olds pass, and these paradigms are still used to measure the development of a theory of mind. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.