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Sebastian Suggate

Email sebastian.suggate@otago.ac.nz
Tel +64 3 556 7163

Associate Professor Sebastian Suggate is a developmental psychologist specialising in literacy and language, motor skills, media, mental imagery, aphantasia, and childhood education, including alternative education approaches.

He competed his undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral studies in psychology at the University of Otago (2009). He then spent nearly 17 years in Europe, as an Alexander-von-Humboldt postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology in Würzburg (2010–2011), as a lecturer in educational science at the University of Regensburg (2011–2014), a professor in educational science at the Alanus University (2014–2015), an associate professor and then professor in Regensburg (2015–2026), with two interim years as an associate professor of psychology in education at the University of York (2022–2024), before returning to the Psychology Department at the University of Otago.

Sebastian’s research has featured in numerous media outlets including:

He has published nearly 60 peer-reviewed papers, and authored several books including Key Topics in Lifespan Development (2026, Routledge: Taylor and Francis).

Teaching

Current PhD students

  • Viktoria Karle
  • Fair Metcalfe
  • Heidi Vogt
  • Rebecca Winter

Research interests

Generally, I am interested in factors affecting child and adolescent development, also across the lifespan, and I'm open to collaboration and supervision in the following areas:

Embodied cognition and fine motor skills

Due to technological developments and lifestyle changes a sedentary lifestyle has become widespread, constituting a serious health risk. This broader societal development raises many questions for how this affects child and adolescent development, particularly through the lens of embodied cognition. Further, our extensive research has shown that children’s and adolescents’ fine motor skills relate to cognitive and academic development.

In future research, I want to (a) continue testing how fine motor skills relate to learning and cognition, (b) expand the motor construct to examine the role of underlying skills from other domains, such as vestibular, proprioception, and sensory integration, and (c) investigate different populations, such as in older adulthood or in specific conditions (e.g., ADHD).

Mental imagery and aphantasia

Broadly, mental imagery skill is the ability to re-experience, simulate, explore, and savour events, processes, and stimuli when they are not physically present. Mental imagery is not just visual, but includes the other senses such as auditory, tactile, proprioceptive, vestibular, thermoceptive, visceroceptive/nocioceptive, and gustatory domains. Also, there are great individual differences in the experience of mental imagery, ranging from none at all (aphantasia) to extremely realistic and vivid (hyperphantasia).

However, three main challenges exist for mental imagery research. First, objective measures of mental imagery are scarce, which has implications for both research and the identification of people with aphantasia. Second, we know very little about the development of mental imagery and what role childhood experiences and education play. Third, we have little understanding of mental imagery as a multimodal phenomenon – for instance do aphantasics have better imagery in non-visual domains? Or, what effect does our visual-media dominant culture have on imagery skill?

Literacy and language development

One purpose of reading is to gain access to experiences and information that extend one’s horizon. To do so, often requires skills that go beyond decoding to language and imagination (including mental imagery). Being able to successfully simulate what is read in text, likely depends on embodied mental simulation skills, alongside good decoding and word recognition skills. In this research focus, I aim to combine what is learned in the other two foci listed above and apply this to the science of reading. What role do handwriting and motor skill play in reading? What role do the senses play in creating mental simulations from text or in language processing? How can children’s language development be supported?

Education

The call of the times is for education to be broad, inclusive, and speak to the developmental needs of growing children in different contexts. This requires, in my view, a critical and long-term appraisal of the consequences of school experiences for later development, including media in schools, the role of movement and aesthetic experiences, well-being and resilience, alongside academic content and curricula. There are vastly different educational approaches internationally and nationally (e.g., mainstream in its various forms, indigenous, Steiner/Waldorf, Montessori), which can be evaluated and contrasted, capitalising on this heterogeneity to generate new knowledge and approaches.

Publications

Suggate, S., Schaughency, E., McAnally, H., & Reese, E. (2018). From infancy to adolescence: The longitudinal links between vocabulary, early literacy skills, oral narrative, and reading comprehension. Cognitive Development, 47, 82-95. doi: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.04.005 Journal - Research Article

Schaughency, E., Suggate, S., & Reese, E. (2017). Links between early oral narrative and decoding skills and later reading in a New Zealand sample. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 22, 109-132. doi: 10.1080/19404158.2017.1399914 Journal - Research Article

Suggate, S., Reese, E., Lenhard, W., & Schneider, W. (2014). The relative contributions of vocabulary, decoding, and phonemic awareness to word reading in English versus German. Reading & Writing, 27(8), 1395-1412. doi: 10.1007/s11145-014-9498-z Journal - Research Article

Suggate, S. P., Schaughency, E. A., & Reese, E. (2013). Children learning to read later catch up to children reading earlier. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28(1), 33-48. doi: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2012.04.004 Journal - Research Article

Reese, E., Sparks, A., & Suggate, S. (2012). Assessing children's narratives. In E. Hoff (Ed.), Research methods in child language: A practical guide. (pp. 133-148). Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Chapter in Book - Research

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