Account Of Social Cognition Research Articles

An Embodied View on Collaboration in Early Childhood Education: Combining Microanalysis and Introspective Analysis of Experiences to Understand Meaning-Making Between Children With and Without Intellectual Disabilities

AbstractThis paper has a twofold aim. The first is to report a qualitative study exploring the construction of collaborative interactions between typically developing children and children with intellectual disabilities in early childhood education, shifting from a cognitivist toward an embodied account of social cognition. The study combined microanalysis of embodied engagements and a phenomenological method of systematic introspective analysis of experience (PRISMA) to investigate the emergence and maintenance of collaborative interactions. The second aim is to showcase the complementarity of the methods and their potential use as a tool for understanding intersubjectivity in children’s social interactions. Participants were twenty-four children aged 3–4: six with intellectual disabilities and eighteen typically developing children. Data consisted of eighteen video recordings of collaborative interactions in a semi-natural context in daycare centres. The results show how typically developing children start the interaction and lead it toward task completion through a scaffolding process of non-verbal regulations facilitated by abbreviations of communication and a combination of sequential actions. This process created bodily invitations for the peer’s engagement, notably stronger amongst preferable peers, corroborating previous research on the relevance of such relationships in this age group. The introspective analysis provided insights into how the desire to work together surpasses the need to complete the task—collaboration can emerge outside the pre-determined task and relies on joint actions rather than understanding tasks’ goals. Peer relations built during the interactions guided children’s behaviours and changed their engagement in the task. This result brings a new perspective to pedagogical planning in early childhood education, indicating the need for teachers to understand children’s intersubjective processes as well as elaborate on task instructions and organisation of space and materials. Results also suggest that previous individual embodied experiences can influence such collaborative efforts, which, although may be expected intuitively, is an underexplored perspective in education sciences. This insight underscores the importance of considering students’ backgrounds and relationships when designing pedagogical approaches. Understanding how prior experiences and peer dynamics affect collaboration can inform more effective teaching strategies in inclusive early childhood education and guide professional training in the field. The findings are critically discussed concerning the implications for professional education and training in inclusive early childhood education.

Who do they think they are?: A social-cognitive account of gender differences in social sexual identity and behavior at work

To understand who initiates social sexual behavior (SSB) at work, we examine the strength of individuals’ social sexual identity (SSI), a self-definition as a person who leverages sex appeal in pursuit of personally valued gains. Using a social-cognitive framework that explores the intersection of personality, motivation, and situations, six studies (N = 2,598) establish that SSI strength is a novel predictor of SSB, including sexual harassment, and SSI strength mediates gender differences in SSB tendencies. We find that men’s (but not women’s) propensity to initiate SSB increases when pursuing self-enhancement goals (e.g., a powerful image), and these gender differences are mediated by momentary SSI strength. By contrast, the adoption of self-transcendence (e.g., affiliation) goals mitigates gender differences in SSB. Together, these findings illustrate the central role of the self-concept in explaining why and when gender differences emerge in patterns of SSB.

Socially Extended Scientific Knowledge.

A three-tiered account of social cognition is set out—along with the corresponding variety of social knowledge that results from this social cognition—and applied to the special case of scientific collaboration. The first tier is socially-facilitated cognition, which results in socially-facilitated knowledge. This is a form of cognition which, while genuinely social (in that social factors play an important explanatory role in producing the target cognitive success), falls short of socially extended cognition. The second tier is socially extended cognition, which generates socially extended knowledge. This form of cognition is social in the specific sense of the information-processing of other agents forms part of the socially extended cognitive process at issue. It is argued, however, that the core notion of socially extended cognition is individual in nature, in that the target cognitive success is significantly creditable to the socially extended cognitive agency of the individual. Socially extended cognition, in its core sense, thus generates individual knowledge. Finally, there is distributed cognition, which generates distributed knowledge. This is where the cognitive successes produced by a research team are attributable to a group agent rather than to individuals within the team. Accordingly, where this form of social cognition generates knowledge (distributed knowledge), the knowledge is irreducibly group knowledge. It is argued that by making clear this three-tiered structure of social scientific knowledge a prima facie challenge is posed for defenders of distributed scientific cognition and knowledge to explain why this form of social knowledge is being exhibited and not one of the two weaker (and metaphysically less demanding) forms of social knowledge.

To err is human but not deceptive.

This study addresses a poorly understood but important question concerning the cognition of deception: How much more is there to lying than to responding incorrectly, the latter capturing how researchers have occasionally operationalized deception? A recent social-cognitive account of lying - Activation-Decision-Construction-Action Theory (ADCAT) - asserts a qualitative difference between the two - for instance, that deception involves Theory of Mind inferences and more proactive interference. To test these notions within-subjects, participants answered closed-ended and open-ended questions probing general truths honestly, deceptively, or with intentional errors. Response time and noncompliance with instructions were the dependent measures. Deceptive responding generally elicited the longest response times and the lowest instruction compliance, followed by intentional erring, supporting the theory. Although not the primary focus, response inhibition due to implausible deception was demonstrated for the first time.

Reciprocity and alignment: quantifying coupling in dynamic interactions.

Recent accounts of social cognition focus on how we do things together, suggesting that becoming aligned relies on a reciprocal exchange of information. The next step is to develop richer computational methods that quantify the degree of coupling and describe the nature of the information exchange. We put forward a definition of coupling, comparing it to related terminology and detail, available computational methods and the level of organization to which they pertain, presenting them as a hierarchy from weakest to richest forms of coupling. The rationale is that a temporally coherent link between two dynamical systems at the lowest level of organization sustains mutual adaptation and alignment at the highest level. Postulating that when we do things together, we do so dynamically over time and we argue that to determine and measure instances of true reciprocity in social exchanges is key. Along with this computationally rich definition of coupling, we present challenges for the field to be tackled by a diverse community working towards a dynamic account of social cognition.

An own-age bias in mixed- and pure-list presentations: No evidence for the social-cognitive account.

The own-age bias (OAB) is suggested to be caused by perceptual-expertise and/or social-cognitive mechanisms. Bryce and Dodson (2013, Psychology and Aging, 28, 87, Exp 2) provided support for the social-cognitive account, demonstrating an OAB for participants who encountered a mixed-list of own- and other-age faces, but not for participants who encountered a pure-list of only own- or other-age faces. They proposed that own-age/other-age categorization, and the resulting OAB, only emerge when age is made salient in the mixed-list condition. Our study aimed to replicate this finding using methods typically used to investigate the OAB to examine their robustness and contribution to our understanding of how the OAB forms. Across three experiments that removed theoretically unimportant components of the original paradigm, varied face sex, and included background scenes, the OAB emerged under both mixed-list and pure-list conditions. These results are more consistent with a perceptual-expertise than social-cognitive account of the OAB, but may suggest that manipulating age salience using mixed-list and pure-list presentations is not sufficient to alter categorization processes.

The impact of culture on mindreading

The role of culture in shaping folk psychology and mindreading has been neglected in the philosophical literature. This paper shows that there are significant cultural differences in how psychological states are understood and used by (1) drawing on Spaulding’s recent distinction between the ‘goals’ and ‘methods’ of mindreading (2018) to argue that the relations between these methods vary across cultures; and (2) arguing that differences in folk psychology cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the cognitive architecture that facilitates our understanding of psychological states. The paper concludes that any good account of social cognition must have the conceptual resources to explain how culture affects our understanding of psychological states, and that this explanandum should not be an after-thought but instead a guiding feature for those accounts.

An Own-Age Bias in Mixed- and Pure-List Presentations: No Evidence for the Social-Cognitive Account

The own-age bias (OAB) is suggested to be caused by perceptual-expertise and/or social-cognitive mechanisms. Bryce and Dodson (2013, Psychology and Aging, 28, 87, Exp 2) provided support for the social-cognitive account, demonstrating an OAB for participants who encountered a mixed-list of own- and other-age faces, but not for participants who encountered a pure-list of only own- or other-age faces. They proposed that own-age/other-age categorization, and the resulting OAB, only emerge when age is made salient in the mixed-list condition. Our study aimed to replicate this finding using methods typically used to investigate the OAB to examine their robustness and contribution to our understanding of how the OAB forms. Across three experiments that removed theoretically unimportant components of the original paradigm, varied face sex, and included background scenes, the OAB emerged under both mixed-list and pure-list conditions. These results are more consistent with a perceptual-expertise than social-cognitive account of the OAB, but may suggest that manipulating age salience using mixed-list and pure-list presentations is not sufficient to alter categorization processes.

Bodily expressions, feelings, and the direct perception account of social cognition

In this paper, I will argue in favor of a direct perception account of social cognition (DP), focusing on the idea that we can directly grasp at least some mental states of others through their bodily expressions. I will investigate the way we should consider expressions and their relations to mental phenomena in order to defend DP. In order to do so, I will present Krueger and Overgaard’s idea of expressions as constitutive proper parts of the mental phenomena expressed and I will show how this position can support DP. Then, I will present the way in which the authors seem to construe the relation of parthood between expressions and mental states – that is in terms of components (or, pieces, as I will argue) of integral wholes, and I will introduce the possible issues that derive from this strategy. I will propose a different way to understand this parthood relation, referring to Husserl’s notion of moments as distinct from that of pieces (Husserl 1900-1901). I will narrow my analysis to expressions of feelings, and I will try to argue that they can be described more aptly as moments of the feelings expressed. Finally, I will show how this account can support DP.

Enactive social cognition: Diachronic constitution & coupled anticipation.

This paper targets the constitutive basis of social cognition. It begins by describing the traditional and still dominant cognitivist view. Cognitivism assumes internalism about the realisers of social cognition; thus, the embodied and embedded elements of intersubjective engagement are ruled out from playing anything but a basic causal role in an account of social cognition. It then goes on to advance and clarify an alternative to the cognitivist view; namely, an enactive account of social cognition. It does so first by articulating a diachronic constitutive account for how embodied engagement can play a constitutive role in social cognition. It then proceeds to consider an objection; the causal-constitutive fallacy (Adams & Aizawa, 2001, 2008; Block, 2005) against enactive social cognition. The paper proceeds to deflate this objection by establishing that the distinction between constitution and causation is not co-extensive with the distinction between internal constitutive elements and external causal elements. It is then shown that there is a different reason for thinking that an enactive account of social cognition is problematic. We call this objection the 'poverty of the interactional stimulus argument'. This objection turns on the role and characteristics of anticipation in enactive social cognition. It argues that anticipatory processes are mediated by an internally realised model or tacit theory (Carruthers, 2015; Seth, 2015). The final part of this paper dissolves this objection by arguing that it is possible to cast anticipatory processes as orchestrated as well as maintained by sensorimotor couplings between individuals in face-to-face interaction.

Feeling excluded? Join the crowd: How social exclusion affects approach behavior toward consumer-dense retail environments

Due to its essentiality to survival, humans evolved a psychological system that monitors social affiliation. When the system detects a threat, such as social exclusion, perceptions and responses are biased toward regaining affiliation. Retail environments that are crowded with other consumers, often viewed as an obstacle to consumer approach behavior, may instead be perceived positively by socially excluded consumers. Three studies test this premise and results suggest that socially excluded consumers are more likely to choose a crowded retail space, and exhibit higher intentions to browse and spend more money at a crowded retailer. Consistent with an evolutionary social cognitive account, socially excluded consumers exhibit a heightened affiliation motivation that increases crowding perceptions, in turn enhancing intentions to spend time and money. Mood and hedonic shopping orientation are ruled out as alternative explanations.

Prior Knowledge, Episodic Control and Theory of Mind in Autism: Toward an Integrative Account of Social Cognition.

Over the last 30 years, research has explored theory of mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to others. Work on ToM in typical and atypical populations has shed light on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social understanding and interaction. The ToM hypothesis has long been regarded as one comprehensive explanation of the severe cognitive and behavioral impairments encountered by individuals with autism. However, high-functioning individuals can often pass both first-order and second-order false belief tasks using cognitive compensation strategies. To provide more sensitive measures of mental state attribution abilities, researchers have introduced more difficult, “advanced” theory of mind tasks. In this article, we argue that in attempting to bypass compensation strategies, these new advanced ToM tasks, such as the Faux Pas and the Strange Stories tasks, impose cognitive demands beyond those specific to the domain of ToM. We then provide an integrative account of social deficits in autism that takes into account several distinct components of mental state understanding, including both general cognitive capacities and processes specific to ToM. We argue that a number of related cognitive abilities, including episodic cognitive control and inferencing from prior knowledge, are necessary to understand how both people with autism and typical development navigate challenging, real-life social situations.

Is Man the Measure of All Things? A Social Cognitive Account of Androcentrism

Androcentrism refers to the propensity to center society around men and men’s needs, priorities, and values and to relegate women to the periphery. Androcentrism also positions men as the gender-neutral standard while marking women as gender-specific. Examples of androcentrism include the use of male terms (e.g., he), images, and research participants to represent everyone. Androcentrism has been shown to have serious consequences. For example, women’s health has been adversely affected by over-generalized medical research based solely on male participants. Nonetheless, relatively little is known about androcentrism’s proximate psychological causes. In the present review, we propose a social cognitive perspective arguing that both social power and categorization processes are integral to understanding androcentrism. We present and evaluate three possible pathways to androcentrism deriving from (a) men being more frequently instantiated than women, (b) masculinity being more “ideal” than femininity, and/or (c) masculinity being more common than femininity.

Social Cognition, Empathy and Agent-Specificities in Cooperation

In this article, I argue for cooperation as a three-dimensional phenomenon lying on the continua of (i) a cognitive, (ii) a behavioural, and (iii) an affective axis. Traditional accounts of joint action argue for cooperation as involving a shared intention. Developmental research has shown that such cooperation requires rather sophisticated social cognitive skills such as having a robust theory of mind - that is acquired not until age 4 to 5 in human ontogeny. However, also younger children are able to cooperate in various ways. Moreover, the coordinated behaviours of the agents can be more or less complex. Finally, phenomenological considerations and findings from social psychology illustrate that (shared) affective states and agent-specificities may play a central role in cooperative activities. I end with discussing the implications of my analysis that speak in favour of a pluralist account of social cognition.

Individualism versus interactionism about social understanding

In the debate about the nature of social cognition we see a shift towards theories that explain social understanding through interaction. This paper discusses autopoietic enactivism and the we-mode approach in the light of such developments. We argue that a problem seems to arise for these theories: an interactionist account of social cognition makes the capacity of shared intentionality a presupposition of social understanding, while the capacity of engaging in scenes of shared intentionality in turn presupposes exactly the kind of social understanding that it is intended to explain. The social capacity in question that is presupposed by these accounts is then analyzed in the second section via a discussion and further development of Searle’s ‘sense of us’ and ‘sense of the other’ as a precondition for social cognition and joint action. After a critical discussion of Schmid’s recent proposal to analyze this in terms of plural pre-reflective selfawareness, we develop an alternative account. Starting from the idea that infants distinguish in perception between physical objects and other agents we distinguish between affordances and social affordances and cash out the notion of a social affordance in terms of “interaction-oriented representations”, parallel to the analysis of object affordances in terms of “action-oriented representations”. By characterizing their respective features we demonstrate how this approach can solve the problem formulated in the first part.

The social nature of overimitation: Insights from Autism and Williams syndrome

When imitating novel actions, typically developing preschoolers often copy components of the demonstration that are unrelated to the modeled action’s goal, a phenomenon known as ‘overimitation’. According to the social motivation account, overimitation fulfills social affiliation motives (i.e., the imitator’s drive to experience social connectedness with the demonstrator and the social context). Conversely, according to the social-cognitive account, overimitation reflects overattribution of causal relevance (i.e., the imitator’s failure to appreciate that some components of the demonstration are not relevant to the action’s outcome). Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and William syndrome (WS) are characterized by reduced and enhanced spontaneous social motivation, respectively, as well as similar impairments in social-cognition, thus providing helpful test cases to understand the nature of overimitation. Using a novel eye-tracking paradigm, we examined overimitation in 31 preschoolers with ASD, 18 age- and IQ-matched peers with WS, and 19 age-matched typically developing children. We found that children with WS and typically developing children were more likely to overimitate, and to increase their attention to the model’s face during demonstration of causally irrelevant actions, compared to those with ASD. These findings will be discussed in the context of support for the social-motivational account of overimitation.

Pluralism, social cognition, and interaction in autism

In this paper, I investigate social cognition and its relation to interaction in autism from the perspective of a pluralist account of social understanding by considering behavioral as well as neuroscientific findings. Traditionally, researchers have focused on mental state reasoning in autism, which is uncontroversially impaired. A pluralist account of social cognition aims to explore the varieties of social understanding that are acquired throughout ontogeny and may play a role in everyday life. The analysis shows that children with autism are well able to understand other people’s behavior by considering social rules and norms, scripts, and stereotypes. Moreover, some individuals with autism succeed in understanding other people’s behavior in terms of mental states by employing explicit behavioral rules as a compensatory strategy. The paper ends with a discussion of the social cognitive (dys)functions in autism and their relation to the motivation of individuals with autism to engage in social interaction.

Joint Perception of a Shared Object: A Minimalist Perceptual Crossing Experiment.

The minimalist perceptual crossing paradigm has emphasized the essential role of interpersonal dynamics on social understanding. Within the particular case of minimalist interaction, it has been argued that interpersonal processes can constitute social cognition, at least partially, which calls for a paradigm shift in social cognition studies. In this paper, we review several perceptual crossing experiments and their theoretical implications, and propose an original experiment to go beyond strictly dyadic interactions. Whereas past experiments have used objects as distracters of dyadic interaction, our experiment aims at integrating objects themselves as the goal of interpersonal coordination. We asked 24 subjects to participate in a minimalist perceptual crossing experiment where they had to decide, based on their on-line interaction in a one-dimensional digital space, which of the objects they perceived was also perceptible by their partner. The main results suggest that the mutual awareness of a shared object (SO) arises from the quality of sensorimotor coordination between the partners. Indeed, the presence of a SO acts as a simultaneous affordance that attracts and structures individual perceptive activities, giving both partners the opportunity to co-construct a shared world where their respective actions make sense. We discuss our results by way of an enactive account of social cognition, taking the joint perception of a SO as a first step to account for joint attention.

Whose mind? Two interpretations of what it is to directly perceive other minds

According to direct perception theory (DPT) people understand each other’s minds by way of perceiving each other’s behavioral engagements in the world. I argue that DPT admits of two interpretations. One interpretation is found in Searle’s social ontology. The other interpretation departs from an enactivist account of social cognition. Both can make sense of what it is to perceive other minds, but in two different ways. The first claims that people can directly perceive states of mind shared in a community. In contrast, the second interpretation allows for direct perception of particular individuals’ states of mind in the context of participation in social practices. The two interpretations are argued to be compatible. People can perceive communal states of mind in another’s responsiveness to action possibilities in social environments, not only the particular other’s states of mind.

A social cognitive account of relational work

AbstractPostmodern accounts of politeness are founded on the idea that theoretical ‘second order’ conceptualizations (e.g., politeness2) must be grounded in ‘first order’ interlocutor interpretations (e.g., politeness1). One consequence of this assumption is that the generalizability of