Week 6 Flashcards
Social cognition and development overview
Babies are social creatures, already thinking about their relationships with others very early on. As social bonding is crucial to survival in humans, it’s important for babies to develop an understanding of social interactions. These social interactions require significant cognitive abilities such as face perception. For example, do babies distinguish between faces and non-faces? Listen to Dr Kaufman introduce social development and some of this week’s key concepts.
In many species, social bonds between infant and child are apparent early on. This is because social bonding is vital for the survival of otherwise helpless infants. However, there are other reasons why social development is particularly important in primates, including humans. Social group size of primate species holds a very strong relationship to the size of the neocortex (Dunbar, 1993). Social interactions require extensive cognitive resources. This week we will look at these social cognitive abilities and how they develop.
Face and emotional recognition in infants
Human faces vary…and being able to recognise people when you see their face is an important human skill. Psychologists have been exploring how well babies can recognise faces for many years.
(Harris & Westermann, 2014, p. 104)
Originally it was thought that newborn infants did not perceive faces and discriminate between them until around two months of age. Maurer & Barrera (1982) and Johnson et al. (1992) showed that infants did not show a preference for face stimuli over scrambled faces at one month of age. However, Johnson et al. (1991) showed that newborns only 30 minutes old would track face-like stimuli further than scrambled face stimuli. This orienting reflex helps infants start to learn about other people by directing them towards the relevant information.
What Johnson & Morton (1991) tell us is the brain has some information about face structure and infants will follow faces with their gaze.
What it does not tell us:
Whether infants prefer static faces. Anything about individual faces. If face recognition is innate.
Select each of the titles to learn more about aspects of face recognition in infants.
Preference for Static Faces:
Johnson et al. (1992) found that at two months infants look longer at a face than a non-face object. There is no such preference at one month.
During trials with chicks (Johnson & Horn, 1987), it was found they will imprint to basically anything, but after a few hours there are robust preferences for trained objects (previously imprinted) versus novel ones. In absence of mother hen, any conspicuous moving object larger than a matchbox will do. In chicks, the intermediate and medial part of the hyperstiatum ventrale (IMHV) is considered to be analogous to the mammalian cortex (i.e. like that in humans). When these were damaged (with lesions) before and after imprinting, this would impair the preference for a trained object (but this did not affect other visual learning tasks). Similar lesions elsewhere did not have a similar effect. There are two processes at play when looking at filial imprinting:
- Orienting towards suitable stimuli (face/neck region).
- Acquiring information about objects to which young chick attends. Served by IMHV (lesioned chicks showed no preference for chicken over duck).
Facial Perception: Development
Johnson & Morton (1991) explained these discrepant findings in terms of the two behaviours (tracking and preference) tapping face recognition systems in two different areas of the brain. Select each of these systems to learn more.
Subcortical face system
The subcortical face system is ‘on-line’ at birth and mediates preferential tracking. The subcortical face system is thought to be an innate mechanism for bringing faces into the infant’s visual field.
Cortical face system
The cortical face system develops later than the subcortical face system and mediates face preferences. The cortical face system is though to be a developed face representation which has been shaped by the innate orienting reflex.
Read more about infant recognition of the human face in 6.1 Recognising other people (Links to an external site.) (Harris & Westermann, 2014, pp. 103–106).
Discriminating between Faces:
As well as a representation of what a face is, we need to develop an ability to discriminate between them. Pascalis, De Haan, & Nelson (2002) have explored the development of face discrimination across the first year of life. They examined infants’ ability to discriminate between human faces and
monkey faces. Their findings showed:
Six-month-olds were able to discriminate between both the human faces and the monkey faces. Ten-month-olds were only able to discriminate between the human faces.
Gaze following in infants
Newborn infants prefer to look at direct gazing faces rather than averted gaze faces (Farroni, Csibra, Simion & Johnson, 2002). Thus, as well as being set up to attend more to social stimuli (people, faces), it seems that newborn infants have an innate system which orients them towards social interactions. We encourage this orienting reflex in infants such as with the eyebrow flash (a cross-cultural phenomenon wherein a person raises their eyebrows quickly to initiate a social interaction).
Joint visual attention
Joint attention is ‘[a]n aspect of early communication [where] a mother and her child both [look] at the same object’ (Harris & Westermann, 2014, p. 92).
Joint visual attention involves the ability to locate the object of someone else’s attention. The studies of Butterworth & Cochrane (1980) and Butterworth & Jarrett (1991) found that at:
six months, infants follow to first object they see in their field of view ten months, infants follow to any object in their field of view eighteen months, infants can manage objects outside of their visual field.
These developments involve, or teach, knowledge concerning other people’s perspectives.
Read more about joint attention and how it relates to atypical development in children with autism in Box 8.2: Autism and theory of mind (Links to an external site.) (Harris & Westermann, 2014, pp. 150–151).
Theory of mind
During the preschool period children begin to develop an understanding of what other people think, feel and want and how this will affect their behaviour. This knowledge is referred to as social cognition. As the term suggests, social cognition can be viewed as being on the boundary of social and cognitive development. The preschool period marks an important milestone in children’s social cognition because between the ages of three and four children acquire what has become known as a ‘theory of mind ’.
(Harris & Westermann, 2014, p. 147)
Theory of mind (Premack & Woodruff, 1978) is the ability to impute mental states to oneself and to others which are different from one’s own current mental state. This involves understanding alternative perspectives and decentring from egocentric representations. Piaget considered this kind of ability as developing during the preoperational period. A number of ways of examining this have been put forward.
The false belief and deceptive box task
Watch the following video which demonstrates a deceptive box task (involving a Smarties box) and a false belief task and looks at how children internally represent the complexity of their social world by learning to understand how other people’s minds work.
Wimmer & Perner (1983) examined children’s understanding of others’ incorrect alternative perspectives (false beliefs), such as those depicted in the previous video. The typical finding is a sudden change in ability between three and four years of age.
Perner, Leekham & Wimmer (1987) determined that false belief testing can be extended to one’s own previous beliefs. They found that three year-olds stated they always thought there was a pencil in the box (the Smarties task); whereas four year-olds did not.
Appearance-reality
Flavell, Flavell & Green (1983) tested Piaget’s assertion that children cannot distinguish appearance from reality (due to egocentrism). When children were presented with a rock made of sponge on first encounter, all children said that it ‘looks like a rock’. After inspecting it manually, three year-olds said, ‘It looks like a sponge’ whereas four year-olds said, ‘It’s a sponge, but it looks like a rock.’ Flavell et al. thus argued that children undergo a conceptual shift in their ability to understand the difference between mental state (appearance) and reality.
The following interactive activity allows you to see how various age groups of children responded to researcher Rheta DeVries’ cat when dressed in a mask. As you explore this activity, consider what this says about these children’s concept of appearance versus reality at various stages.
Rheta DeVries (emertius Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Northern Iowa) conducted a study in 1969, which involved her very placid cat called Maynard. This cat would allow Rheta to put realistic masks on him. After getting to know Maynard, children would then be presented with the masked version.
Three year-olds
The three year-olds who participated in the study were captured by appearance with some believing the cat had become a dog.
Four to five year-olds
The four to five year-olds were confused by the reappearance of Maynard in a mask.
Six year-olds
The six year-olds understood that Maynard was disguised in a mask.
A conceptual shift
All these changes in ability to understand mental states after age three suggest that there may be a stage-like conceptual development going on. This was evidenced by the following studies:
False belief (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Deceptive box/representational change (Perner et al., 1987). Past self (Povinelli et al., 1996). Appearance-reality (Flavell et al., 1983; De Vries, 1969).
Gopnik & Astington (1988) contended that children’s performance on all tasks correlated, and that they exhibited marginally worse performance in understanding representational change. This formed an argument for a conceptual shift after age three.
An innate module for mental states
Leslie (1990) argues that mental state understanding is provided by an innately specified theory of mind module (ToMM). The evidence for ToMM is that there are:
precursors to theory of mind observable in infants and toddlers (pretend play and false belief) absence of theory of mind in children with autism (absence of ToMM module).
Pretend play
In order to understand someone else’s perspective we have to decouple from our own (Leslie, 1989). This is the principle behind pretend play. For instance, pretending a banana is a phone requires ‘decoupling’ from the perceptual information that the object is indeed a banana. In infants, pretend play emerges just before two years of age. Leslie interprets this as the action of an innate theory of mind module, which is the precursor to success at false belief.
Autism
Autism is a profound disability which in the 90s affected around 4/1000 children (there is now a much higher incidence). There are a triad of impairments, which include:
impaired social abilities impaired communication repetitive/stereotyped behaviours.
Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith (1985) found that autistic children were impaired (80% failed) at a false belief task relative to four year-olds, and older children with a low mental age, such as those with Down’s syndrome (86% passed). This raises the question: is autism an impairment of theory of mind?
Read Chapter 6: Social and emotional development in infancy (Links to an external site.) (Harris & Westermann, 2014, pp. 103–122) to discover how childhood events can affect an individual’s life.
- the ability of babies to recognize faces develops over time but at birth, babies already have highly developed abilities to recognize familiar voices and smells. Both voice and smell are important in the early recognition of familiar people, usually the babys mothers and other members of the family.
Recognising Faces:
- the very first study was carried out by Fantz using a visual preference technique in which he recorded the time that babies spent looking at diffeent kinds of stimuli, including face-like stimuli. Initiall, lead reserachers to think that babies were born with a very specific preference for faces.
- most recent researchers has supported this view, showing that newborn babies have more general preference for certain kinds of visual stimuli. Up-down asymmerty (face has more features on the top half), congruency (wider at the top) Turati 2004 shows this
- means they spend a lot of time looking at and learning about the faces of people they see. Experience gradually shapes infants abilities to recognice new faces. at 6 month, infants are as good a discriminating one face from another. By 9 months they lookse the ability to discriminate against monkeys faces and they perform like adults in only being able to relibaly discriminate human faces. Caucasian infants were able to discriminate between faces within their own racial group. However 9 months only evidence for same-race faces.
Linking Faces and Voices:
- Kuhl & Meltzoff - shows auditory visual co-ordination in infancy. talking human face is PARTICULARLY ATTRACTIVE STIMULUS AND EXPLAINS why young babies spend alot of time looking at the faces of their caretakers. Also learning the responses of their caretakes.
Imitating Other People:
- parent might produce an action and an infant might produce a very similar action by these may not be causally connected.
- Meltzoff argues that the infant ability to imitate underpins social-communicative development, cognitive development and serves as a foundation for understanding other minds. This is a bold claim since it puts imitation at the heart of much early development. Infants could imitate these actions, sticking out their own tongue, pursing their lips and opening and closing their mouth in response to the adult. Less than an hour old. Infants distinguish between 2 types of lip movement and between straight tongue protrusion and protrusion to the side.
- Infants can reproduce an imitated action independently of the model adult. Meltzoff and Moore 1977 - infants sucked on a dummy while the adult produced the target actions and later produced the behaviour when looking at a passive face.
- a number of researchers argued that one important function of infant imitation is to socially engage other people.
- Meltzoff argues that this behaviour served to test out the identity of the adult. Infants could see that this was a different person but as they had not seen one person leave and a new person enter they have two sources of conflicting information about who this person was.
- When an infant produces an action, an adult is very likely to imitate it. In this way, we can see imitation as a 2 way processes that enables infants and adults to develop complex sequences of mutual imitation. They looked longer at the adult who was imitating them and they smiled more.
- Reddy has identified a number of behaviours that appear around 6 months of age, when an infant and a familiar adult are interacting. showing off, clowing, teasing. The increasing complexity of the infants role in these real life interchanges observed by Reddy in real life is echoed in Meltszoffs finding that the ability to vary an imitative sequence develops over the first year of life.
Smiling and Social Recognition:
- very early smiling appears to be internally generated, that is, it does not occure in response to external stimuli
- at 6 weeks of age the first social smiling appears. Babies begin to smile at familiar social stimuli.
- by 6 weeks babies smile to voices, particularly their mothers voice. Blind babies will smile at the sound of their mothers voice or when touched.
- The sight of the face becomes a particularly strong stimulus for smiling.
- Ahrens 1954 found that babies would smile at a paid of red dots on a white oval background.. From about 3 months, smiling is social and reciprocal in that the babys smile is now synchronised with the smiles of familiar adults.
Development of Attachment:
- In developmental psych it has a very specific meaning as the term first coined by John Bolwlby to describe the special relationship that exists between a mother and a child. Changing patterns of childcare have raised questions about the kind of attachment relationships children form as a result of their experiences and we consider some of these issues later in the below.
- Harry Harlow - 1960’s - influenced by Freud - mother-child relationship has an important role in development of personality. Argued that hunger may not be the primary driver of attachment and he set out to demonstrate this in a series of now-famous experiments with rhesus monkeys. (1 cloth no food, 1 wire with food, monkeys chose comfort over food) Argued that the multi factorial theory of attachment was required.
- John Bowlby - argued that the first attachment relationship is based on unlearned, species-specific behaviours. To feel attached, is to feel safe and secure in the particular relationship. Insecure attachment involves mixed feelings - dependency and fear of rejection.
- key idea of the theory is that the mother provides a secure based from which the developing infant can explore the world and periodically return in safety. The emotional attachment of the baby to the mother normally provides the infant with a sense of safety and security. Thus secure attachment in infancy will pave the way for secure and successful attachments in adulthood that will contribute to the reproductive success of the species in the long term.
- differed from Harlow, biological necessity of attachment for psychologically healthy development. Bowlby argued that insecure patterns of attachment contribute to the formation of a neurotic personality because they take the child down psychologically unhealthy developmental pathways giving rise to personality problems and mental ill health. Permanent separation from an attachment figure had serious long-term consequences. However with good relationships with the surviving parent, friends of family they can be ok.
- Mary Ainsworth - 3 key indicators - proximity seeking - if someone is ttached to another person they will seek out and spend time with that person. separation protest - such as crying and screaming following separation from the attachment firure. secure base supplied by the parent. 8 months = develop stranger anxiety and will be destressed. 12 months, provokes strong reactions.
- 66% are secure attachment, 20% anxious avoidant, 12% anxious resistant. recently found type d = disorganised-disoriented (freezing)
- Both Bowlby and Ainsworth aruged that the way the mother interacted wih her infant had an important role to play in the kind of attachment relationship that her child developed.
- Ainsworths general conclusions were that mothers of securely attached 1 year olds tend to be responsive and attentive to their babies at 3 months and sensitive to their responses.
Cultural Differences:
- Japan = insecure as mums never leave them
- German - secure as they are very social
- fathers play a larger role now
Child Care:
- Belsky 2001 - the amount of care - predicted insecurity of attachment at 36 months again in interaction with insensitive mothering. Good quality day care does not impact attachment security, poor child care = exacerbate the effects of insensitive mothering.
Development of Self-Concept:
- Rochat - notes that one view is that the sense of self in infancy develops primarily through relationships with other people
- Stern argued against the importance of the social environment for the emergence of the cself concept
- Gibson - the environment is an important for the development of sense of self.
Perceptions of Bodily Movements:
- Rochat - infant own body is primary object of perceptual exploration. when we percieve or act on object or person in the world we also perceive ourselves in relation to that object or person. 3 months of age = infants can observe spending sustained periods looking at their hand as it is held above their body while they lie on their back. Over the next few weeks, infants bring both hands to the midline more and more frequently often watching their hands as they move in from of them.
- He found that by 3 months of age infants looked longer at the unfamiliar view
Self-Recognition:
- do not recognise themselves.
- Rouge task (putting red lipstick on their face)
- 15 months notice the mark, reach to remove
- 24 months they will do this too.
- Down syndrome - delayed reaction
- requires a combination of perceptual and cognitive abilities that are not yet formed.
- infants recognise other people in photos before they recognise themselves.
Responding to Emotions:
- newborns can imitate emotional expressions and cry in response to the prolonged crying of other babies.
- towards the end of the first year, infants start to use adults expressions as a guide to their own actions, social referending
- look at the mum as a guide to check reaction.
- if mothers look sad they do not venture
- look at the caregiver not just the mum
- Hepach and Westermann - 14 months greater pupil dilation. 10 months did not show this pattern.
- Masten - it shows how long lasting the effects are of early maltreatment on childrens perceptoins of emotions.
Read more about theory of mind, how it is tested and how it relates to a child’s social cognition in sections 8.5 to 8.7 from Chapter 8: Cognitive development in the preschool years (Links to an external site.) (Harris & Westermann, 2014, pp. 145–154).
Theory of mind - Premack and Woodruff - tested if chimps have it, they do.
The essence of the false belief task is that a child is given some cruicial info that the second person does not know. In kids they use the smarties task. Young children will say that another child will this that the tube contains pencils even if they havent seen whats inside.
- Sally-Ann Task - a test of a theory of mind in which a girl doll hides a marble and then does for a walk. A second doll then moves the marble while sally is still away and so cannot see what has happened. The Children are asked where sally will look for the marble.
- it is possible that the standard false belief task is too cognitively demanding for young children, in order to pass it a child has to remember the sequence of events as they have happened.
Social Influences on TOM:
- Meins - mother infant pairs - comment was considered appropriate if the coder judged that the mother had correctly interpreted her childs behaviour or commented on something related to an ongoing activity. at 48 months the children were additionally given a false belief task. The children were also given a verbal intelligence score and this was used to ensure that relationships among scores were not simply the result of differing levels. These were verbal intelligence and the proportion of the mothers appropriate mental state comments at 6 months.
- mind mindedness - to describe the way in which parents appropriately interpret their infannts desires and intentions. Argues that early experience of mind mindedness provides an infant with relevant experience that can help develop TOM.
Early cognitive origins of TOM.
- Moll & Tomasello 2007 - 12 - 18 months played with an adult and 2 novel toys in succession.. The ability to discriminate between what is novel to you and what is novel to someonelse could be seen as laying the foundations for the development of a theory of mind, although it is important to note that considerably more development is necessary before children can respons appropriately in the classic TOM task involving false belief.
- Longitudinal study - 10 - 12 months - novelty preference as measured by the difference in looking times for the consistent and inconsistent conditions, did not predict TOM.
- Wellman - argued that his finding suggests a specific link between early social attention and later theory of mind rather than a more general link with early intelligence. the relationship between the rate of habituation and tTOM remained even when both IQ and executive functioning were accounted for.
1.) Research has shown that newborn infants show a preference for general face-like properties and _______________________ visual stimuli? (C)
a) Symmetrical and incongruent stimuli
b) Asymmetrical and incongruent stimuli
c) Asymmetrical and congruent stimuli
d) Symmetrical and congruent stimuli
2.) When a caregiver is non-responsive to an infant (i.e. provides a still face), what will infants typically do? (D)
a) decrease the amount of gazing, and increase smiling and vocalisation towards their caregiver
b) increase the amount of gazing, smiling and vocalisation towards their caregiver
c) search the room to seek attention and comfort from others
d) decrease the amount of gazing and smiling, and increase vocalisation towards their caregiver
3.) What age do infants typically start showing signs of anxiety when in the presence of a stranger according to research conducted by Ainsworth and Bell (1970)? (A)
a) 8 months
b) 12 months
c) 4 months
d) 18 months
