Development of Social Cognition

Abstract

Social cognition in humans is uniquely complex. Recent experimental procedures, cleverly modelled on everyday situations, now confirm that some basic mentalizing is evident in infants' non-verbal communication and helping behaviours. A study showed that 6- to 8-year-old children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), when presented with the same scenario, consistently failed to look to the box where the actor thought the toy would be. This shows that automatic, non-verbal mindreading is disrupted in children with ASD, in addition to the more explicit social-cognitive and communicative problems characteristic of the disorder. There are measurable individual differences amongst children in their rates of social-cognitive development. These individual differences have been linked to some specific consequences for children's everyday social life. While not yet translated into formal interventions, training studies have shown that exposure to mentalistic conversation boosts social-cognitive skill in typically developing children.

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