Social Cognition in Children

What is “Thinking”?

The photo to the right depicts a famous bronze sculpture by the French artist Auguste Rodin in 1904. You may be familiar with this Western image that comes to some people’s minds when they start to “think about thinking.”

The sculpture emphasizes the more internal nature of thinking — that it is something done by oneself in a contemplative sort of way. This idea of thinking being solitary may initially seem to be in opposition to the ideas and foundation of this book as thinking embedded in cultural and social interaction. But, the act of thinking can certainly be solitary, and this solitary aspect has been emphasized in Western models.

What the brain does is indeed internal, so we must consider the fact that we cannot actually see thinking or explain it easily. That’s why experimental psychologists have done so many experiments! They are observing behaviours that are associated with thinking. In every experiment, we, as scientists, are inferring what is going on inside children’s minds, so we can never be entirely certain.

We can even take images or measure the electrical activity of the brain, but those do not point specifically to what a thought is. Rather, cognitive neuroscience helps us to understand the locations of certain types of thinking in the brain’s physical organ. Thinking is complex and necessarily abstract and cannot be explained by experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience alone.

Throughout this course, you have been stopping to reflect on how day-to-day activities you engage in yourself or with children involve attention, memory, and problem-solving. Now, we are shifting our focus to how young children also think about thinking. Another term for this is metacognition, which is a very important part of learning and schooling.

As children come to realize there is this sort of internal “mental world,” all kinds of insights can emerge about other people as well as about themselves. Consider some of the following common scenarios

• A three-year-old who accidentally knocks over another child in the playground but is confused when you have them apologize because they didn’t mean to do it.
• A five-year-old who tells you a story beginning with “they came so fast into the park and we were surprised…” and you have no idea who “they” are.
• When a young child starts to use mental state words like “think,” “wonder,” and “remember.” What do these words mean?

As you can imagine, the world of what a thought is and what others might be thinking or feeling is complex and abstract. So we will begin our discussion with simpler steps in social cognition, starting with infancy.

Social Cognition in Infancy

Researchers have found that infants are thinking about others’ perspectives, even if they cannot talk or understand differences of opinion and other mental differences from their own. This is found in two key areas that are linked with one another: joint attention (see Chapter 3) and social referencing (see Siegler and Alibali, 2019).

You may recall from Chapter 3 that one mechanism for children’s development of attention is to establish joint attention with adults who will often label something within view to both, which supports a young child’s learning. 

But other situations require a sort of social interpretation — so less about labelling a bird or a truck and more about establishing what is going on amongst the many people in the environment, or perhaps even detecting danger or reacting to a surprising stimulus (such as a car honking or another infant crying all of a sudden). How is an infant to respond to such information?

We also touched on the fact that infants are constantly being presented with new information and stimuli in the environment and that they have to use selective attention to focus on only one at a time, or they may soon become overwhelmed. 

This is all to say that a young infant is trying to understand the world with little experience. Fortunately, they seem to learn quickly enough that adults, particularly their close adults such as parents or grandparents, can be deferred to in order to facilitate their understanding. 

Social referencing occurs when an infant encounters something noteworthy in their environment and looks to the adult to gauge how to respond to this noteworthy stimulus or event. Think of adults gathering for a social event with infants on their laps, and all of a sudden, one of them bursts into tears. An infant on their father’s lap looks at the infant crying but also looks up at their father. The father will perhaps respond calmly and explain to the infant what is happening: “Yes, Liam is crying, isn’t he?” 

One key component of social referencing is that the infant is preverbal and does not likely understand the content of any explanation from the father. Rather, the father’s calm, assured tone and reaction provide comfort to the infant, and they follow the father’s lead. It is like a social roadmap for interpreting other people or events long before they are understood.

Eye Contact

Gauvain (2001) discusses laboratory-based research done in the West on social referencing, reporting that it first happens between nine and 12 months (p. 93) and typically involves eye contact. Gauvain reports on several experimental studies conducted with infants, mothers and unfamiliar objects; many of these demonstrate how infants aged 12-18 months use information from parents to guide their actions.

This is clearly something that Western data is showing but pause and think for a moment about some of the assumptions that contribute to these studies. First, it is assumed that looking at children in interaction with their parent(s) in a laboratory setting will provide meaningful insights into how children may or may not rely on social cues from their parent. Second, it is interpreting the ways in which social cues occur from specific behaviours, the primary of which is eye contact.

In this chapter’s research spotlight, Akhtar and Gernsbacher (2008) investigate the question of just how important eye contact may be and the ways in which eye contact may vary as a function of culture. But before reading their article, please complete the storybook scenario below.