The Development of Social Cognition

Social Cognition

We can understand the development of social cognition if we first break down and comprehend what the term social cognition means.

Our daily lives include processing information from external and internal means to predict situations and behaviours. Social interaction is one of the most important elements we depend on as humans, where we respond after interpreting others’ behaviours.

Example of Social Cognition

Here are some examples of social cognition.

• Emphasising and expressing condolences to someone who may have lost a pet after observing others do the same.
• Noticing that when people drink, they often do embarrassing things, and so you would expect the same for yourself if you drank too much.

Selman’s Levels of Perspective-Taking

According to Selman (1976, 1980), looking at things from other people’s perspectives is crucial for most social activities, such as teamwork, convincing others, etc.

Selman (1976, 1980) designed an experiment to analyse this ability in children by doing the following:

• Preparing different social scenarios.
• Each scenario had several people (characters).
• These social scenarios allowed the children to look at the situation from the point of view of several people.
• After narrating the scenarios, the children had to answer a few open-ended questions to evaluate their responses from others’ point-of-view.

Let’s take a look at an example scenario:

Open-ended questions for children

1. Should Emily go after the children that bullied her friend?
2. In your opinion, will Emily’s mother tell her off?
3. Will Emily think her mother will punish her if she chases the children?

The scenario includes the point-of-view of different people like Emily, James (her friend), Emily’s mother, the lady with the pushchair and the children who took away James’s bike.

Selman collected the children’s responses and classified the responses’ into five different stages. Children gradually move from the first stage (egocentric) to the last stage (societal perspective-taking).

Selman’s Levels of Perspective-Taking: Evaluation

Let us now explore the strengths and weaknesses of Selman’s perspective-taking.

The perspective-taking method by Selman is flexible and reliable, and many researchers used it for further research. Researchers can tailor this method according to the age of the children (e.g., using different scenarios or an interview).

However, Kurdek (1977) criticises the study because perspective-taking is a complex phenomenon that can be understood better through longitudinal studies. It is a complicated cognitive skill that cannot be limited to certain stages and needs longitudinal observations to understand fully.

The Role of the Mirror Neuron System in Social Cognition

Neurons are nerve cells communicating information to and from the brain and body through electrical impulses. Mirror neurons are the nerve cells activated when someone performs an action or observes someone else performing the same action.

Social Cognition: Neuron Research by Rizzolatti et al. (1996)

Rizzolatti et al. (1996) researched monkeys which involved infusing thin electrodes in their brains to monitor the activity of individual neurons. The researchers analysed that a neuron called F5 would become activated when a monkey reached for a peanut to eat.

F5 was also activated when the monkey (physically inactive) observed another monkey reach for a peanut to eat or heard another monkey cracking or munching peanuts. Researchers observed the following key factors while making the monkeys perform different tasks:

• F5 (mirror neuron) was activated when there was a movement between the monkey’s hand and mouth for a target object (peanuts, in this case).
• Casual hand and mouth movements didn’t activate the mirror neurons without any target object within sight.
• Mirror neurons also activated when the monkey heard another monkey hold and crack a peanut to eat.
• Several mirror neurons are activated during the movements of the hands and mouth.

Social Cognition: Neuron Research by Di Pellegrino et al. (1992)

The researchers found that specific neurons fire when monkeys perform goal-directed hand movements such as grasping, holding and tearing.

The same neurons also fired when the monkeys watched the experimenters perform the same actions. For instance, when grabbing a piece of food from a table and taking food from another experimenter’s hand.

But what can we understand from the research?

When we see someone else perform an action, such as reaching out for cookies, it activates the same neurons (mirror neurons) as if we performed that task (picking up cookies). This helps us understand our own goals and intentions if we perform that task.

Similarly, mirror neurons activated when we are in pain also get activated when observing someone else in pain, as per brain scanning studies such as Rizzolatti and Craighero (2006). This process is called empathy, to feel the pain of others and understand others’ situations.

An effectively functioning mirror neuron system can help us easily imitate any movement observed and can explain how we develop skills, such as social cognition.

The Sally-Anne Test

In 1985, Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith designed a study to assess the theory of mind ability (the ability to understand others by attributing mental states to them) among autistic children called the Sally-Anne test. The theory of mind is crucial for developing social cognition as it allows us to understand others’ perspectives, which is what we need to comprehend to predict our own and others’ actions, i.e. social cognition.

The Sally-Anne test makes use of verbal instructions and enacted scenarios.

It can only be used when the participants have well-formed language skills to attempt the test and fully understand the instructions. The test involves a scenario with Sally and Anne dolls.

The Sally-Anne Test

The researchers compared three groups of children (autistic children, children with Down syndrome, and neurotypical children) for the theory of mind ability.

All children varied in age but had a similar verbal age (matched for the same level of language understanding and development):

• 20 autistic children with verbal age of five and a half years and actual age between 6–16

• 14 Down syndrome children with verbal age of 3 years and actual age between 6–16

• 27 children with no psychological impairment with verbal and actual age at four and a half years

After the researchers acted out the scenario, every child had to answer one ‘reality’ question, one ‘memory’ question and one ‘belief’ question as follows:

Children must answer the ‘belief’ question correctly to pass the test. The answer to the belief question was correct if the children responded that Sally would look for a ball in the basket.

The results were as follows: