Early Social Cognition

In recent years, much stimulating research has emerged on children's theories of mind, construed as the understanding of others' intentions, beliefs, and desires. In this context, there is a renewed interest in the developmental origins of social cognition. This book is an expression of this new interest, assembling current conceptualizations and research on the precursors of joint engagement, language, and explicit theories of mind. The focus is on what announces such remarkable development. The book is divided into four parts. Part I deals with the nature and development of social cognition in infancy. Each contribution provides a different view of the important features of social cognition in the first months of life. Part II presents recent empirical findings on the developing ability by young infants to detect whether caretakers and social partners are attentive and responsive to their own behavior in social exchanges. Part III focuses on the early development of infants' ability to monitor others in their action, their gazing, their animacy, and their emotion. Part IV offers a commentary on the contributions as a whole, discussing the basic theoretical assumptions guiding current research on early social cognition. The author identifies the conceptual strengths and weaknesses of the work presented and suggests interesting avenues for future research.

Over the past three decades mounting evidence has suggested that infants’ social perceptual and social cognitive abilities are considerably richer than was once thought. By the end of the second year of life, infants discriminate faces along various social dimensions, attend to and understand others’ goals and intentions, use the emotions of others to guide their learning and behavior, attribute dispositional characteristics to other agents, and make basic social evaluations. What has also become clear is that there is a great deal of variability in infants’ social perception and cognition. A critical, outstanding question concerns the nature and meaning of such variability. The proposed Research Topic welcomes papers addressing cutting-edge questions regarding variability and individual differences in early social perception and social cognition. The goal of these papers is to investigate overarching questions in this domain, which are necessary to move the field forward. Variability in early social perception and social cognition (among other domains) in infancy and early childhood is often attributed to noise, or overlooked in favor of focusing on age-related changes. Yet, recent work suggests that variability in social perceptual and social cognitive tasks reliably inter-relates, and predicts real-world social behaviors. For example, infants’ everyday experience with different face categories predicts individual differences in face processing, infants’ production of goal-directed actions predicts their simultaneous understanding of these actions, and variability in social attention during the second year of life is related to theory of mind during the preschool years. These findings suggest that variability in performance on social perception and social cognition tasks is not merely a nuisance variable, but, rather, may provide the key to addressing significant questions regarding the nature of infants’ social perception and social cognition, and the processes that underlie developmental change. Acknowledging and closely examining and investigating variability in early social perceptual and social cognitive abilities may represent a powerful approach for understanding development in (at least) two ways. First, variability can signal transitional points in the developmental onset of a given ability. Thus, such variability, and the extent to which variability relates to experience and/or other abilities, can be used to test hypotheses regarding mechanisms that underlie developmental changes. Second, variability can represent more enduring individual differences between infants. In this case, critical questions arise regarding the source of individual differences (that is, what factors shape the emergence of individual differences?) and whether such early individual differences contribute to the development of more advanced and sophisticated forms of social cognition and behavior. The goal of this Research Topic will be to encourage researchers to take variability in early social perception and cognition seriously. Papers that give variability center stage, and are aimed at addressing the value of variability for identifying developmental mechanisms, as well as investigating the existence, source, and antecedents of early individual differences in social perception and social cognition are welcomed. Taken together, the contributed papers will provide integral new information to the study of social perception and social cognition over the first three years of life.

Navigating the social world requires sophisticated cognitive machinery that, although present quite early in crude forms, undergoes significant change across the lifespan. This book will be the first to report on evidence that has accumulated on an unprecedented scale, showing us what capacities for social cognition are present at birth and early in life, and how these capacities develop through learning in the first years of life. The volume will highlight what is known about the discoveries themselves but also what these discoveries imply about the nature of early social cognition and the methods that have allowed these discoveries -- what is known concerning the phylogeny and ontogeny of social cognition. To capture the full depth and breadth of the exciting work that is blossoming on this topic in a manner that is accessible and engaging, the editors invited 70 leading researchers to develop a short report of their work that would be written for a broad audience. The purpose of this format was for each piece to focus on a single core message: are babies aware of what is right and wrong, why do children have the same implicit intergroup preferences that adults do, what does language do to the building of category knowledge, and so on. The unique format and accessible writing style will be appealing to graduate students and researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and social psychology.

The Development of Social Cognition presents a lively, up-to-date examination of both the classical issues and contemporary understanding of theory and research in social cognitive development. The initial chapters highlight one of the central, theoretical tensions in the field, which is whether the development of understanding people is fundamentally different from understanding things. Subsequent chapters are devoted to development across specific areas of social cognition from infancy through to adolescence. The text ends with a comprehensive examination of the development of moral aspects of social cognition.

New Perspectives on Early Social-Cognitive Development, Volume 258 in the Progress in Brain Research series, highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters on topics such as Dynamics of Coordinated Attention, Investigating the Role of Neural Body Maps in Early Social-Cognitive Development: New Insights from Infant MEG and EEG, Motion tracking in developmental research: Methodological considerations and social-cognitive developmental applications, Early maturation of the social brain: How brain development provides a platform for the acquisition of social-cognitive competence, Getting a grip on early intention understanding: The role of motor, cognitive, and social factors, and much more. Provides the authority and expertise of leading contributors from an international board of authors Presents the latest release in the Progress in Brain Research series Includes the latest information on New Perspectives on Early Social-cognitive Development

For young children, two of the most important tasks they face are learning how to communicate and learning how to think about themselves and the social world around them. The premise of this book is that these two tasks are inherently linked. The communicative routines and language that children learn enable new modes of cognition, which in turn allow for more complex social interactions. The model of early child development that emerges is one in which equal importance is given to the socio-cultural context in which children are developing, and to the role played by children in actively constructing their own knowledge. The book is organized into four thematic sections, each introduced by an integrative overview. The first section, "Language and Cognition," examines the function of language in young children's lives. The second section, "Intentionality and Communication," explores young children's understanding of intentions and their verbal and non-verbal communication. The third section, "Theory of Mind and Pedagogy," examines the ways in which developments in cognitive and communicative skills transform children's participation in the process of teaching and learning. The final section, "Narrative and Autobiographical Memory," looks at the effects of narrative on young children's understanding of themselves and their world. This book will be of great interest to anyone concerned with young children's learning and development.

First published in 1980. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In recent years, much stimulating research has emerged on children's theories of mind, construed as the understanding of others' intentions, beliefs, and desires. In this context, there is a renewed interest in the developmental origins of social cognition. This book is an expression of this new interest, assembling current conceptualizations and research on the precursors of joint engagement, language, and explicit theories of mind. The focus is on what announces such remarkable development. The book is divided into four parts. Part I deals with the nature and development of social cognition in infancy. Each contribution provides a different view of the important features of social cognition in the first months of life. Part II presents recent empirical findings on the developing ability by young infants to detect whether caretakers and social partners are attentive and responsive to their own behavior in social exchanges. Part III focuses on the early development of infants' ability to monitor others in their action, their gazing, their animacy, and their emotion. Part IV offers a commentary on the contributions as a whole, discussing the basic theoretical assumptions guiding current research on early social cognition. The author identifies the conceptual strengths and weaknesses of the work presented and suggests interesting avenues for future research.