Early Social Cognitive Development Research Articles

The brain origins of early social cognition.

This commentary challenges Spelke's view on the early development of social cognition from a neuroscience perspective by presenting an overlooked body of evidence from neuroimaging research on joint attention with human infants. Indeed, evidence demonstrating adult-like, neural sensitivity to joint attention in young infants, supports alternative theoretical views concerning the origins of uniquely human forms of social cognition.

Early social-cognitive development as a dynamic developmental system—a lifeworld approach

Early social-cognitive development as a dynamic developmental system—a lifeworld approach

Neurocognitive and behavioral development in young children (1-7 years) with sex chromosome trisomy.

Investigating sex chromosome trisomies (SCTs) may help in understanding neurodevelopmental pathways underlying the risk for neurobehavioral problems and psychopathology. Knowledge about the neurobehavioral phenotype is needed to improve clinical care and early intervention for children with SCT. This is especially relevant considering the increasing number of early diagnosed children with the recent introduction of noninvasive prenatal screening. The TRIXY Early Childhood Study is a longitudinal study designed to identify early neurodevelopmental risks in children with SCT, aged 1-7 years. This review summarizes the results from the TRIXY Early Childhood Study, focusing on early behavioral symptoms in areas of autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and communication disorders, and underlying neurocognitive mechanisms in domains of language, emotion regulation, executive functioning, and social cognition. Behavioral symptoms were assessed through structured behavior observation and parental questionnaires. Neurocognition was measured using performance tests, eyetracking, and psychophysiological measures of arousal. In total, 209 children aged 1-7 years were included: 107 children with SCT (33 XXX, 50 XXY, and 24 XYY) and 102 age-matched population controls. Study outcomes showed early behavioral symptoms in young children with SCT, and neurocognitive vulnerabilities, already from an early age onward. Neurobehavioral and neurocognitive difficulties tended to become more pronounced with increasing age and were rather robust, independent of specific karyotype, pre/postnatal diagnosis, or ascertainment strategy. A more longitudinal perspective on neurodevelopmental 'at-risk' pathways is warranted, also including studies assessing the effectiveness of targeted early interventions. Neurocognitive markers that signal differences in neurodevelopment may prove to be helpful in this. Focusing on early development of language, social cognition, emotion regulation, and executive functioning may help in uncovering early essential mechanisms of (later) neurobehavioral outcome, allowing for more targeted support and early intervention.

COVID-19 in the context of pregnancy, infancy and parenting (CoCoPIP) study: protocol for a longitudinal study of parental mental health, social interactions, physical growth and cognitive development of infants during the pandemic

IntroductionWhile the secondary impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the psychological well-being of pregnant women and parents has become apparent over the past year, the impact of these changes on...

The development of early social cognitive skills in neurogenetic syndromes associated with autism: Cornelia de Lange, fragile X and Rubinstein\u2013Taybi syndromes

BackgroundCornelia de Lange (CdLS), Fragile X (FXS) and Rubinstein–Taybi syndromes (RTS) evidence unique profiles of autistic characteristics. To delineate these profiles further, the development of early social cognitive abilities in children with CdLS, FXS and RTS was compared to that observed in typically developing (TD) and autistic (AUT) children.MethodsChildren with CdLS (N = 22), FXS (N = 19) and RTS (N = 18), completed the Early Social Cognition Scale (ESCogS). Extant data from AUT (N = 19) and TD (N = 86) children were used for comparison.ResultsSimilar to AUT children, children with CdLS, FXS and RTS showed an overall delay in passing ESCogS tasks. Children with CdLS showed a similar degree of delay to AUT children and greater delay than children with FXS and RTS. The CdLS, FXS and RTS groups did not pass tasks in the same sequence observed in TD and AUT children. Children with CdLS (p = 0.04), FXS (p = 0.02) and RTS (p = 0.04) performed better on tasks requiring understanding simple intentions in others significantly more than tasks requiring joint attention skills.ConclusionsAn underlying mechanism other than general cognitive delay may be disrupting early social cognitive development in children with CdLS, FXS and RTS. Factors that may disrupt early social cognitive development within these syndromes are discussed.

Clinical pointers from developing self-awareness.

Seven typical developmental steps are described as cardinal changes leading children from implicit embodied self-awareness at birth, self-consciousness by 2 years, and the adoption of an ethical stance toward others by the preschool years (3-5y). This development may be a useful benchmark for clinicians. In this review, some clinical pointers are outlined in relation to each developmental step, but with a particular focus on the testing of self-awareness in children with developmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, and intellectual disability. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: There are seven major steps in early self and social awareness. Clinical pointers related to each of the seven steps are provided.

Evidence-based support for autistic people across the lifespan: maximising potential, minimising barriers, and optimising the person-environment fit.

Autism is both a medical condition that gives rise to disability and an example of human variation that is characterised by neurological and cognitive differences. The goal of evidence-based intervention and support is to alleviate distress, improve adaptation, and promote wellbeing. Support should be collaborative, with autistic individuals, families, and service providers taking a shared decision-making approach to maximise the individual's potential, minimise barriers, and optimise the person-environment fit. Comprehensive, naturalistic early intervention with active caregiver involvement can facilitate early social communication, adaptive functioning, and cognitive development; targeted intervention can help to enhance social skills and aspects of cognition. Augmentative and alternative communication interventions show preliminary evidence of benefit in minimising communication barriers. Co-occurring health issues, such as epilepsy and other neurodevelopmental disorders, sleep problems, and mental health challenges, should be treated in a timely fashion. The creation of autism-friendly contexts is best achieved by supporting families, reducing stigma, enhancing peer understanding, promoting inclusion in education, the community, and at work, and through advocacy.

Culture and early social-cognitive development.

From a developmental systems perspective, this chapter focuses on the question whether culture matters for children's early social-cognitive development. Based on a review of the current cross-cultural literature, we evaluate the current state of research on cross-cultural similarities and differences in major developmental milestones of early social cognition, namely (i) the development of self-awareness and an understanding of self and others as intentional agents, (ii) advanced forms of social learning and (iii) prosocial cognition and behavior. Overall, the current cross-cultural research suggests universality without uniformity: the common suite of social-cognitive skills emerges reliably and, at the same time, there are culture-specific accentuations of social-cognitive development across domains that mostly are in line with cultural values, beliefs and practices. By following different agendas when providing and structuring physical and social settings for their children, caregivers coherently organize infants' nascent intuitions, sentiments, and inclinations into increasingly coherent patterns of attention, appraisal, experience and behavior that are in line with cultural ideals and beliefs. By doing so, culturally informed social interaction sets the stage for culture-specific modulations of social cognition already in the first years of life.

Human infants’ understanding of social imitation: Inferences of affiliation from third party observations

Imitation is ubiquitous in positive social interactions. For adult and child observers, it also supports inferences about the participants in such interactions and their social relationships, but the origins of these inferences are obscure. Do infants attach social significance to this form of interaction? Here we test 4- to 5.5-month-old infants’ interpretation of imitation, asking if the imitative interactions they observe support inferences of social affiliation, across 10 experimental conditions that varied the modality of the imitation (movement vs. sound), the roles of specific characters (imitators vs. targets), the number of characters in the displays (3 vs. 5), and the number of parties initiating affiliative test events (1 vs. 2). These experiments, together with one experiment conducted with 12-month-old infants, yielded three main findings. First, infants expect that characters who engaged in imitation will approach and affiliate with the characters whom they imitated. Second, infants show no evidence of expecting that characters who were targets of imitation will approach and affiliate with their imitators. Third, analyzing imitative interactions is difficult for young infants, whose expectations vary in strength depending on the number of characters to be tracked and the number of affiliative actors to be compared. These findings have implications for our understanding of social imitation, and they provide methods for advancing understanding of other aspects of early social cognitive development.

The roots of critical thinking: Selective learning strategies in childhood and their implications.

To many individuals, including professionals and the general public, the word conjures the mental image of a classroom or other formal educational setting. Yet, learning is a lifelong phenomenon that, far from being restricted to the classroom, is a constant process in the life of any human being. On a daily basis, we learn about changes in our physical surroundings (Oh look, I didn't know they were building a new high rise here!); our social worlds (Is Jessica dating Jordan now?); about how various things and systems function (This is an interesting article about the merits and drawbacks of various electoral systems.) and about events both near and far away (Has there been a terrorist attack again?). The capacity for learning and adaptation to a wide variety of circumstances has been hypothesised to be one of the greatest strengths of the human species.Individuals can learn through direct interaction with the world around them, however a lot of information is instead acquired second-hand, via the claims of other people, printed sources such as books and websites, and various other media. Of course, not all sources of information are equally valid. For instance, a person may communicate with others fully intending to convey accurate information, but instead spread erroneous information because they are themselves mistaken or possess outdated knowledge. A person could also intentionally mislead others for various purposes: personal gain, mischief, or plain disregard for accuracy, among numerous potential motives. Sources of information with wildly diverse degrees of reliability have always existed; yet, concern about unreliable sources and their negative impacts on knowledge has increased manifold recently along with the sheer volume of inaccurate information that is available, especially on unregulated platforms such as the Internet (e.g., Hunt, 2016). Thus, in today's world, people are constantly risking being misinformed rather than informed. Arguably, being able to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources of information is as essential to the learning process as is the ability to acquire information in the first place.Critical evaluation of sources can appear complex, and yet some early abilities in this domain are present very early in life. Indeed, as will be reviewed in this article, infants and children have the capacity to discriminate between different sources of information and show clear preferences for learning from some sources rather than others long before formal education begins. These early abilities are of course not as sophisticated as those of adults, but they nevertheless form an impressive foundation on which more advanced critical evaluation strategies could potentially be built with input from parents and educators alike.This paper summarises existing research on the topic of selective learning in early childhood. The past two decades have seen an explosion of research on this topic, showing that children, particularly during the preschool years, can take into account a variety of attributes when deciding from whom to learn. Some of these attributes can be seen as reliability indicators, such as a source's past accuracy (i.e., all else being equal, it is likely preferable to accept information from a person-or a media source- that has been accurate in the past rather than from one with a history of dubious claims). Other attributes, such as familiarity or ingroup status of individuals, are used by children to discriminate between sources and may sometimes risk playing against any critical evaluation skills that children possess. To date, the knowledge that has been accumulating on this topic has mostly circulated between researchers working on the basics of early socialcognitive development. However, understanding the evaluative biases that young children hold before they even begin formal education can be informative for researchers in a variety of fields. …

Does social environment influence learning ability in a family-living lizard?

Early developmental environment can have profound effects on individual physiology, behaviour, and learning. In birds and mammals, social isolation during development is known to negatively affect learning ability; yet in other taxa, like reptiles, the effect of social isolation during development on learning ability is unknown. We investigated how social environment affects learning ability in the family-living tree skink (Egernia striolata). We hypothesized that early social environment shapes cognitive development in skinks and predicted that skinks raised in social isolation would have reduced learning ability compared to skinks raised socially. Offspring were separated at birth into two rearing treatments: (1) raised alone or (2) in a pair. After 1year, we quantified spatial learning ability of skinks in these rearing treatments (N=14 solitary, 14 social). We found no effect of rearing treatment on learning ability. The number of skinks to successfully learn the task, the number of trials taken to learn the task, the latency to perform the task, and the number of errors in each trial did not differ between isolated and socially reared skinks. Our results were unexpected, yet the facultative nature of this species' social system may result in a reduced effect of social isolation on behaviour when compared to species with obligate sociality. Overall, our findings do not provide evidence that social environment affects development of spatial learning ability in this family-living lizard.

Theory of Mind Development is Impaired in 4-year-old Children with Prenatal Exposure to Maternal Tobacco Smoking.

Theory of Mind (ToM) is an important component of social cognition. Deficits in ToM are found in various neurodevelopmental disorders and social and environmental factors have been found to influence ToM development. Little previous research has focused on effects of exposure to toxins; this report examines the impact of tobacco. Department of Psychiatry, University of Colorado School of Medicine, between April 2006 - August 2012. 101 children, 18 with prenatal exposure to tobacco, underwent ToM testing at 40 (n=89) and 48 (n=77) months of age. Test questions received dichotomous pass/fail scores and percentage of correct responses was utilized as the primary dependent variable. At 40 months of age children were rarely able to correctly answer false belief questions and there were no significant differences according to prenatal tobacco exposure. At 48 months of age, there was a significant effect of prenatal tobacco exposure with non-exposed 48-month-olds correctly answering 45±40.6% of content false belief questions correctly, compared to 13.9±25.3% for 48-month-olds with prenatal tobacco exposure (F=4.79, df= 1,73, p=.032). ToM abilities are rapidly developing between 40 and 48 months of age. Prenatal exposure to tobacco is associated with impairment at 48 but not 40 months of age. This finding supports consideration of nicotinic mechanisms as contributors to early development of social cognition.

“Like Me”: Preference for similarity leads way to early development of social cognition

“Like Me”: Preference for similarity leads way to early development of social cognition

The Early Ontogeny of Social Norms

AbstractRecent research has produced new insights into the early development of social cognition and social learning. Even very young children learn and understand social activities as governed by conventional norms that (a) are arbitrary and shared by the community, (b) have normative force and apply to all participants, and (c) are valid in context‐relative ways. Importantly, such understanding is revealed both in the fact that children themselves follow the norms, and in the fact that they actively enforce them toward third parties. Human social cognition thus has a fundamental normative dimension that begins early. This norm psychology plausibly evolved due to its role in stabilizing group coordination and cooperation, and is one of the foundations of what is uniquely human social learning and culture.

Evolution, Development, and Human Social Cognition

Explaining the causal origins of what are taken to be uniquely human capacities for understanding the mind in the first years of life is a primary goal of social cognitive development research, which concerns so called “theory of mind” or “mindreading” skills. We review and discuss particular examples of this research in the context of its underlying evolutionary conceptual framework known as the neo-Darwinian modern synthesis. It is increasingly recognized that the modern synthesis is limited in its neglect of developmental issues. A recent convergence of work from diverse sources, including but not limited to evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) and developmental systems approaches, demonstrate the need for a developmental expansion of modern evolutionary theory. We attempt to show that not only are nativist explanations of early human social cognition vulnerable to the criticisms of this developmental shift in thinking, but that these criticisms also problematize the dominant and more mainstream theories in early social cognitive development research. We conclude by discussing the importance of developmental analysis in understanding the ontogeny of cognitive capacities in individuals as well as species.

Effects of eye gaze cues provided by the caregiver compared to a stranger on infants’ object processing

Previous research has shown that eye gaze affects infants’ processing of novel objects. In the current study we address the question whether presenting a highly familiar face vs. a stranger enhances the effects of gaze cues on object processing in 4-month-olds. Infants were presented pictures of the infant's caregiver and another infant's caregiver (stranger) either turning eye gaze toward an object next to the face or looking away from the object. Then objects were presented again without the face and event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded. An enhanced positive slow wave (PSW) was found for objects that were not cued by the caregiver's eye gaze, indicating that these objects required increased encoding compared to objects that were cued by the caregiver's gaze. When a stranger was presented, a PSW was observed in response to objects regardless of whether the objects were gaze-cued or not. Thus, the caregiver's eye gaze had a larger effect on infants’ object processing than the stranger's gaze. This suggests that at 4 months of age the caregiver's eye gaze is easier to process for infants, more salient, or both. The findings are discussed in terms of early social cognitive development and face processing models.

The supine position of postnatal human infants

In this review, we discuss the implications of placing an infant in the supine position with respect to human cognitive development and evolution. When human infants are born, they are relatively large and immature in terms of postural and locomotor ability as compared with their closest relatives, the great apes. Hence, human mothers seemingly adopt a novel pattern of caring for their large and heavy infants, i.e., placing their infants in the supine position; this promotes face-to-face communication with their infants. Moreover, infants in the supine position can interact with other nearby individuals in the same manner from an early age. In addition, the infants can also explore their own body parts and/or objects with their hands since the hands are not required to support the body and are therefore, free to move. These activities are considered to be fundamental to the early development of human social and nonsocial cognition, including knowledge of self, in the first six months after birth. Further, developmental continuity in the voluntary exploratory movements in the prenatal period (in utero) to the early postnatal period is also discussed.

Looking at Eye Gaze Processing and Its Neural Correlates in Infancy—Implications for Social Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder

The importance of eye gaze as a means of communication is indisputable. However, there is debate about whether there is a dedicated neural module, which functions as an eye gaze detector and when infants are able to use eye gaze cues in a referential way. The application of neuroscience methodologies to developmental psychology has provided new insights into early social cognitive development. This review integrates findings on the development of eye gaze processing with research on the neural mechanisms underlying infant and adult social cognition. This research shows how a cognitive neuroscience approach can improve our understanding of social development and autism spectrum disorder.

Infants' neural processing of positive emotion and eye gaze

Previous research demonstrated that young infants' neural processing of novel objects is enhanced by a fearful face gazing toward the object. The current event-related potential (ERP) study addresses the question of whether this effect is driven by the particular threat-value of a fearful expression or whether a positive emotion could elicit a similar response. Three-month-old infants' brain responses were measured while infants were presented with happy and neutral faces gazing toward simultaneously presented objects (Experiment 1) or happy and neutral faces gazing away from objects (Experiment 2). Then the objects were presented again without the face. While infants showed an increased neural response for happy relative to neutral faces looking towards objects, infants did not differentiate between happy and neutral faces gazing away from the objects. Furthermore, infants showed no different response to objects alone in Experiment 1. However, infants responded with an increased negative central component (Nc) indicating increased attention for objects in the neutral face condition in Experiment 2. The current results confirm previous findings showing that infants allocate increased attention to an emotional face if it directs eye gaze toward an object in the environment. However, a happy expression does not increase subsequent processing of the gaze-cued object. The findings are discussed in terms of early social cognitive development.

Diffuse optical imaging of brain activation to joint attention experience

In the early development of social cognition and language, infants tend to participate in face-to-face interactions engaging in joint attention exchanges. Joint attention is vital to social competence at all ages, lacking which is a primary feature to distinguish autistic from non-autistic population. In this study, diffuse optical imaging is used for the first time to investigate the joint attention experience in normal adults. Imaging studies were performed in the frontal regions of the brain (BA9 and BA10) in order to study the differences in the brain activation in response to video clips corresponding to joint attention based skills. The frontal regions of the brain were non-invasively imaged using a novel optical cap coupled to a frequency-domain optical imaging system. The statistical analysis from 11 normal adult subjects, with three repetitions from each subject, indicated that the averaged changes in the cerebral blood oxygenation levels were different under the joint and non-joint attention based stimulus. The preliminary studies demonstrate the feasibility of implementing diffuse optical imaging towards autism-related research to study the brain activation in response to socio-communication skills.