Developmental pathways for social understanding: linking social cognition to social contexts.

Kimberly A Brink,Henry M Wellman,Jonathan D Lane

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00719

Kimberly A Brink, Henry M Wellman + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00719

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Abstract

Contemporary research, often with looking-time tasks, reveals that infants possess foundational understandings of their social worlds. However, few studies have examined how these early social cognitions relate to the child’s social interactions and behavior in early development. Does an early understanding of the social world relate to how an infant interacts with his or her parents? Do early social interactions along with social-cognitive understandings in infancy predict later preschool social competencies? In the current paper, we propose a theory in which children’s later social behaviors and their understanding of the social world depend on the integration of early social understanding and experiences in infancy. We review several of our studies, as well as other research, that directly examine the pathways between these competencies to support a hypothesized network of relations between social-cognitive development and social-interactive behaviors in the development from infancy to childhood. In total, these findings reveal differences in infant social competences that both track the developmental trajectory of infants’ understanding of people over the first years of life and provide external validation for the large body of social-cognitive findings emerging from laboratory looking-time paradigms.

Highlights

Human infants live in a social world and they develop expectations and understandings about people’s actions and interactions in that world
The infant social attentiveness aggregate (β = 0.26, t = 2.01, p < 0.05) and mother–infant responsiveness aggregate (β = 0.25, t = 2.01, p < 0.05) were independent predictors of social attention during the habituation portion of the looking-time study. These findings indicate that infant social cognition, as demonstrated by performance in infant looking-time procedures, does relate to infants’ social interactive behavior
Individual differences in how infants parse and habituate to intentional action displays within laboratory looking-time research clearly relates to mother–infant interaction patterns, in particular the quality of mother–infant interaction

Summary

Introduction

Human infants live in a social world and they develop expectations and understandings about people’s actions and interactions in that world. Based on numerous recent studies of infant social cognition, it is well accepted that during their first year of life infants come to understand that intentional, or goal-directed, states underlie the actions and expressions of others (Baird and Astington, 2005; Sommerville et al, 2005; Akhtar and Martinez-Sussmann, 2007; Tomasello et al, 2005). As noted, this includes appreciating agents as intentional actors (engaged in deliberate acts like reaching for and getting things) and as intentional experiencers (experiencing states like desires for, emotions about, and perceptions of things). Infant temperament seems a good candidate to consider because it is widely argued to reflect important individual differences in infancy that further influence infants’ experiences and interactions within their social worlds

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