Abstract
Social skills refer to a wide group of abilities that allow us to interact and communicate with others. Children learn how to solve social situations by predicting and understanding other's behaviors. The way in which humans learn to interact successfully with others encompasses a complex interaction between neural, behavioral, and environmental elements. These have a role in the accomplishment of positive developmental outcomes, including peer acceptance, academic achievement, and mental health. All these social abilities depend on widespread brain networks that are recently being studied by neuroscience. In this paper, we will first review the studies on this topic, aiming to clarify the behavioral and neural mechanisms related to the acquisition of social skills during infancy and their appearance in time. Second, we will briefly describe how developmental diseases like Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) can inform about the neurobiological mechanisms of social skills. We finally sketch a general framework for the elaboration of cognitive models in order to facilitate the comprehension of human social development.
Highlights
Social cognition involves all the abilities that enable us to understand social agents and to interact with them
By the analysis of the structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data of participants between 7 and 30 years old, this study revealed that the gray matter volume and cortical thickness in medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and posterior temporal sulcus first increases reaching a maximum at about 10 years, and declines until around age 20 (Mills et al, 2012)
We hypothesize that social development depends on a process of neural specialization in these sensory and motor devices. These processes might reveal the development of early onset sensorymotor devices that might work as tools that increase efficiency in the interpretation, attribution, and prediction of the behavior of the social agents in order to engage in complex social interactions
Summary
Social cognition involves all the abilities that enable us to understand social agents and to interact with them. During social development it is possible to observe social behavior precursors, which are necessary abilities for developing the capacity to deal with more complex social information (i.e., to deal with a group of people) Social skills, such as the detection of biology motion and sensitivity to eye-like stimulus, can be understood as precursors, because they appear first in human life and because they are required for the acquisition of further social abilities, like face recognition or joint attention (Charman et al, 2001; Happé and Frith, 2014). Development of social skills play a role in the accomplishment of positive developmental outcomes, including peer acceptance, academic achievement, and mental health (Rao et al, 2008) This temporal sequence encompasses changes that can be observed at both neural and behavioral levels, the literature about social development has drawn up different concepts over the years. We will sketch a general framework for the elaboration of cognitive models in order to facilitate the comprehension of human social development
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