(Social) Cognitive skills and social information processing in children with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the unique contributions of (social) cognitive skills such as inhibition, working memory, perspective taking, facial emotion recognition, and interpretation of situations to the variance in social information processing in children with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities. Respondents were 79 children with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities in the age of 8-12 who were given tasks on social cognitive skills and social information processing. The results from the present study show that emotion recognition, interpretation, working memory and inhibition skills predict social information processing skills. It is concluded that especially emotion recognition and interpretation skills are important cognitive skills that predict social information processing, and therefore should be the focus of treatment.