Journal ArticleDOI
Social Cognition, joint attention and communicative Competence from 9 to 15 months of age
TLDR
It was found that two measures--the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention--predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication.Abstract:
At around 1 year of age, human infants display a number of new behaviors that seem to indicate a newly emerging understanding of other persons as intentional beings whose attention to outside objects may be shared, followed into, and directed in various ways. These behaviors have mostly been studied separately. In the current study, we investigated the most important of these behaviors together as they emerged in a single group of 24 infants between 9 and 15 months of age. At each of seven monthly visits, we measured joint attentional engagement, gaze and point following, imitation of two different kinds of actions on objects, imperative and declarative gestures, and comprehension and production of language. We also measured several nonsocial-cognitive skills as a point of comparison. We report two studies. The focus of the first study was the initial emergence of infants' social-cognitive skills and how these skills are related to one another developmentally. We found a reliable pattern of emergence: Infants progressed from sharing to following to directing others' attention and behavior. The nonsocial skills did not emerge predictably in this developmental sequence. Furthermore, correlational analyses showed that the ages of emergence of all pairs of the social-cognitive skills or their components were inter-related. The focus of the second study was the social interaction of infants and their mothers, especially with regard to their skills of joint attentional engagement (including mothers' use of language to follow into or direct infants' attention) and how these skills related to infants' early communicative competence. Our measures of communicative competence included not only language production, as in previous studies, but also language comprehension and gesture production. It was found that two measures--the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention--predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication. Results of the two studies are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of social-cognitive development, for theories of language development, and for theories of the process by means of which human children become fully participating members of the cultural activities and processes into which they are born.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition
TL;DR: It is argued and present evidence that great apes understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention (shared intentionality), and children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life.
Journal ArticleDOI
Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases.
TL;DR: The Perception-Action Model (PAM), together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature and can also predict a variety of empathy disorders.
Journal ArticleDOI
Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing.
Uta Frith,Chris D. Frith +1 more
TL;DR: The mentalizing (theory of mind) system of the brain is probably in operation from 18 months of age, allowing implicit attribution of intentions and other mental states, and from this age children are able to explain the misleading reasons that have given rise to a false belief.
Journal ArticleDOI
How social contexts support and shape language development
TL;DR: The authors reported evidence regarding the nature of those environmental requirements, the ways in which the varied social contexts in which children live meet those requirements, and the effects of environmental variability in meeting those requirements on the course of language development.
Journal ArticleDOI
The social brain in adolescence
TL;DR: The medial prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus as mentioned in this paper show altered activity during the performance of social cognitive tasks, such as face recognition and mental-state attribution, during adolescence.
References
More filters
Book
Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes
TL;DR: In this paper, Cole and Scribner discuss the role of play in children's development and play as a tool and symbol in the development of perception and attention in a prehistory of written language.
Book
Handbook of Child Psychology
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the importance of biology for human development and the role of the human brain in the development of human cognition and behavior, and propose a model of human development based on the Bioecological Model of Human Development.
Book
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
TL;DR: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Introduction to the First Edition and Discussion Index, by Phillip Prodger and Paul Ekman.
Book
The construction of reality in the child
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors make a distinction between simple temporal displacements in extension due to the repetition of primitive processes on the occasion of new problems analogous to old ones, and the temporal displacement in comprehension due to a transition from one plane of activity to another; that is, from the plane of action to that of representation.