Social cognition concerns the various psychological processes that enable individuals to take advantageof being part of a social group. Of major importance to social cognition are the various social signalsthat enable us to learn about the world. Such signals include facial expressions, such as fear and disgust,which warn us of danger, and eye gaze direction, which indicate where interesting things can be found.Such signals are particularly important in infant development. Social referencing, for example, refers tothe phenomenon in which infants refer to their mothers’ facial expressions to determine whether or notto approach a novel object. We can learn a great deal simply by observing others. Much of this signallingseems to happen automatically and unconsciously on the part of both the sender and the receiver. Wecan learn to fear a stimulus by observing the response of another, in the absence of awareness ofthat stimulus. By contrast, learning by instruction, rather than observation, does seem to depend uponawareness of the stimulus, since such learning does not generalize to situations where the stimulus ispresented subliminally. Learning by instruction depends upon a meta-cognitive process through whichboth the sender and the receiver recognize that signals are intended to be signals. An example wouldbe the ‘ostensive’ signals that indicate that what follows are intentional communications. Infants learnmore from signals that they recognize to be instructive. I speculate that it is this ability to recognize andlearn from instructions rather than mere observation which permitted that advanced ability to benefitfrom cultural learning that seems to be unique to the human race.