Early Social Cognition

Understanding Others in the First Months of Life

Philippe Rochat

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135681258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In recent years, much stimulating research has emerged on children's theories of mind, construed as the understanding of others' intentions, beliefs, and desires. In this context, there is a renewed interest in the developmental origins of social cognition. This book is an expression of this new interest, assembling current conceptualizations and research on the precursors of joint engagement, language, and explicit theories of mind. The focus is on what announces such remarkable development. The book is divided into four parts. Part I deals with the nature and development of social cognition in infancy. Each contribution provides a different view of the important features of social cognition in the first months of life. Part II presents recent empirical findings on the developing ability by young infants to detect whether caretakers and social partners are attentive and responsive to their own behavior in social exchanges. Part III focuses on the early development of infants' ability to monitor others in their action, their gazing, their animacy, and their emotion. Part IV offers a commentary on the contributions as a whole, discussing the basic theoretical assumptions guiding current research on early social cognition. The author identifies the conceptual strengths and weaknesses of the work presented and suggests interesting avenues for future research.

Part I

ORIGINS OF SOCIAL COGNITION

Chapter 1

Social-Cognitive Development in the First Year

Philippe Rochat
Tricia Striano
Emory University

Recent progress in infancy research demonstrates that early on, infants perceive physical objects and expect them to behave according to core principles. These principles include the fact that objects are substantial, occupy space, and cannot be in two places at the same time (Spelke, 1991). Because infants appear to apply these physical principles at an age when they cannot yet have much hands-on experience with objects (2 to 4 months), and unless we assume that these principles are prewired in the neonate, it is likely that they are acquired via active contemplation of things behaving around them (see the description of the “astronomer infant” by Lécuyer, 1989; or the “‘couch potato’ infant” by Willatts, 1997). The numerous studies demonstrating precocious physical knowledge using preferential looking, habituation, or violation of expectation paradigms suggest that this knowledge does not develop primarily from active causation whereby infants learn about objects by analyzing the consequences of their own actions on them. Is this also the case for the development of early social cognition? In this chapter, we suggest that the developing understanding of people in infancy cannot be reduced to what we know regarding the precocious development of physical knowledge. People are more complex than objects, and the development of social knowledge is based on specific processes that reflect this greater complexity.

Intimate, one-to-one relationships are the craddle of social understanding. Although much can be learned from watching people at a distance and not being directly engaged in a social exchange, such learning cannot replace the learning opportunity provided by shared social experiences. This is particularly evident when considering the developmental origins of social cognition. Infants do not develop a social understanding by merely engaging in social “voyeurism,” observing and actively monitoring people behaving around them. Rather than as voyeurs, they learn by engaging in reciprocal exchanges with others. Some 50 years ago, René Spitz made this point clear with tragic footage of infants from crowded orphanages. Deprived of one-to-one contacts with caretakers, these infants showed pervasive behavioral stereotypes, rocking their head back and forth as if negating any contact with the outside world. These infants fell back within themselves rather than opening up to the world of people. Unresponsive to social solicitations, they lost the little social learning opportunity left to them.

In general, social cognition can be construed as the process by which individuals develop the ability to monitor, control, and predict the behavior of others. This ability entails various degrees of understanding, from the perceptual discrimination of feature characteristics and emotional expressions, to the complex represention of intentions and beliefs as determinants of behavior (theories of mind). In this chapter, we present our view on the early ontogeny of social cognition. This view tries to capture important transitions in the development of social cognitive abilities between birth and 12 months of age. Three developmental periods are described with a particular emphasis on two key transitions by 2 and 9 months postnatal age. We review recent empirical findings supporting our contention that these transitions correspond to radical changes or revolutions in the way infants interact with and understand others (for a summary, see Table 1.1 in the conclusion of the chapter). At birth and in the course of the first 6 weeks, infants manifest an essentially innate sensitivity to social stimuli. During this period (the newborn period), neonates display social attunement. We qualify their stance towards people as attentional, with no signs of intersubjectivity. By the second month, infants are presented as manifesting the first signs of shared experience (primary intersubjectivity). This manifestation coincides with the emergence of a novel sense of self as agent in the environment. This represents a first key transition in early social cognitive development (2-month revolution), marked by the emergence of a sense of shared experience (intersubjectivity) and reciprocity with others, as part of a new general stance taken by the infant, the contemplative stance. Based on recent empirical findings, we try to demonstrate that the early intersubjectivity manifested by young infants in a dyadic context (primary intersubjectivity), and social cognition in general, changes in significant ways between 2 and 6 months, announcing the well-documented social cognitive abilities that emerge by the end of the first year in a triadic context (9-month revolution) and the emergence of secondary intersubjectivity. Overall, we discuss social cognitive development in the first year as the transition from a tight coupling between perception and organized action systems at birth to the sense of self and others as differentiated and reciprocal agents by 2 months that leads to the sense of self and others as differentiated and reciprocal agents who can reciprocate as well as cooperate by the end of the first year. At this point in development, infants are starting to take an intentional stance in addition to the contemplative stance they develop by 2 months of age. In a final discussion, we speculate on the possible mechanisms underlying this development. But first, we set the stage by presenting some general considerations regarding the specificity of social knowledge in comparison to physical knowledge and the specific processes underlying social cognition, namely intersubjective mechanisms.

SPECIFICITY OF SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE

The understanding of people determines special knowledge and entails much more than physical knowledge. Although people have bodies, and physical knowledge can account for part of their behavior (e.g., the fact that they can move on their own, can hide or fall, are subject to the forces of gravity, and cannot be at two different locations at the same time), monitoring people and predicting what they are going to do next entails skills that go far beyond physical understanding. Understanding people also defines special processes. Social cognition entails the reading of affects, emotions, intentions, and subtle reciprocities: all the things that make people fundamentally different from objects. In other words, it entails the understanding of a private or dispositional world, what people feel and what characterizes their individual inclinations. But how do we get access to such understanding?

To a large extent, people reveal themselves in the way they reciprocate to us and how, via reciprocity, they convey a sense of shared experience. The same is true for animals and pets. Understanding an animal of a particular species observed in the wild or at a zoo, even for extended periods of time, is different from the understanding of the same animal raised as a pet and with whom we share our life. A sense of shared experience adds to social understanding and gives deeper access to the dispositional characteristics of individuals, whether they are humans or nonhumans. The sense of shared experience that emerges from reciprocity is captured by the term intersubjectivity. We will use this term extensively in this chapter, because we believe that the emerging sense of shared experience determines the early development of social cognition.

Intersubjectivity entails a basic differentiation between the self and others as well as a capacity to compare and project one’s own private experience onto another (e.g., the “like me” stance). Pet owners obviously understand the nonequivalence between themselves and their animal. In the meantime, there is a projection of shared experience (empathic feelings) that bridges the difference between them. Such projective ability is at the core of social understanding. It is instrumental to the understanding of others. Interestingly, the subjective projection appears to be a recent development in primate evolution. Primate species with closer evolutionary links to humans display more frequent and varied empathic behavior to either conspecific or individuals of other species (de Waal, 1996). There is a possible link in phylogeny between the capacity for intersubjective projection and levels of social cognition. We will see that evidence concurs in suggesting such a link exists in early ontogeny.

In reviewing the recent flow of experimental research on infancy, we learn much about the nature of physical knowledge at the origins of development (Baillargeon, 1995; Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992) and comparatively little about the nature of social knowledge. Based on clever experiments, we know about the early onset of object permanence, counting ability, adaptive actions toward objects, and the early understanding of how things move in the world. In comparison, we know little regarding what infants understand about people at the origins of development, what makes people attractive, recognizable and predictable for the infant. This is somehow ironical considering the commonsensical view that infants develop social skills from an early age (Stern, 1977) and that people are what babies seem to care the most about from birth. Infants’ proclivity toward people is obviously adaptive, their survival depending on them directly.

Aside from the fact that people are the main source of nurturance for infants, early behavior and the distribution of attention in newborns also reflect the fact that people provide richer perceptual encounters compared to any other objects in the environment. Neonates display a particular attraction toward people, in particular to the sounds, movements, and features of the human face (Johnson & Morton, 1991; Maurer, 1985). Social cognition probably originates from this innate propensity to devote particular attention to faces. But attending to people is different from attending to physical things. They are more complex entities to learn about and to predict. So how do infants manage to know people? We suggest that they do so primarily by building a sense of reciprocity and developing a sense of shared experiences.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AS SOCIAL COGNITION

The royal way to crack the surface of people’s dispositional world, hence to access crucial information from which their behavior can be monitored, predicted, and controlled, is to reciprocate with them. We propose here that the foundation of social cognition is a sense of shared experience or intersubjectivity developing in infancy in the context of intimate, face-to-face interaction. Before we discuss the importance and function of intersubjectivity in early social cognition, we define three basic categories of subjective experiences that are too often confused in the literature and that form the affective determinants of social exchanges from birth. These basic categories of subjective experiences correspond to feelings, affects, and emotions.

• Feelings are construed here as the perception of specific private experiences such as pain, hunger, or frustration. In comparison to affects (see next), this category of subjective experiences is in general shorter in duration and terminates following particular actions such as feeding for hunger, comfort for pain, or fulfilling a goal for frustration.

• Affects qualify the perception of a general mood or perceived private tone that exists as a background to both feelings and emotions (see next). Affects are diffused and protracted in comparison to feelings. They fluctuate along a continuum from low, general tone (depression) to high tone (inflation). To use a weather metaphor, affects correspond to the perception of the global pressure system at a particular point in time and as it fluctuates from high to low pressure, and vice versa, over protracted time sequences.

• Emotions are the actual observable (public) expressions of feelings and affects by invariant movement dynamics, postures, postural changes, and facial displays as in the behavioral expressions of pain, joy, disgust, sadness, surprise, and anger. Emotions have specific, identifiable features (Darwin, 1872/1965) that serve a communicative function and give public access to what is experienced privately, namely feelings and affects.

Feelings, affects, and emotions are three kinds of basic subjective experience that are part of infants’ private sense of self, from birth and long before they can talk and theorize about them. Neonates clearly have feelings and affects that they express via specific emotional displays such as pain, hunger, or disgust (Hopkins & van Palthe, 1987; Steiner, 1974; Wolff, 1987). In addition to these private experiences, they also demonstrate early on long lasting temperamental traits and particular affective baselines (Kagan & Snidman, 1991). A central question regarding early social cognition is, How do infants start to relate their own private experience to the private experience of others? In our view, this question is central as we propose that intersubjectivity is the cradle of social cognition. If infants from birth have a subjective life, what they primarily develop in their first social relationships is intersubjectivity or the sense of shared feelings, affects, and emotions.

Intimate interaction with people is the ultimate probing ground of how infants feel and what they experience from within. It is the way by which the sense of shared experience or intersubjectivity develops. Reciprocal exchanges are associated with the coregulation of affects, feelings, and behavior (emotions). In such exchanges, the affects, feelings, and emotions of one person echo the affects, feelings, and emotions of the other, either by mirroring, contagion, or merely contingent reactions within a short-time window. This is what characterizes, for example, the mother–infant system while engaging in playful interactions and the emotional coregulation scaffolded by games such as peekaboo or “I’m gonna get you” plays.

The echoing of affects, feelings, and emotions that takes place in reciprocal interaction between young infants and their caretakers is at the origin of intersubjectivity, a necessary element to the development of more advanced social cognition, including theory of mind. Such echoing offers infants the opportunity to match their own private world of experience with the world of others, whether it is a diffuse feeling of well being, sadness, or the intense realization of a precise thought. Before language and the emergence of conventional symbolic systems that enable children to become increasingly explicit about their own experience and to match their private experiences with those of others, dyadic face-to-face interactions and nonverbal play games are the primary source of intersubjectivity. From birth, parents and caretakers nurture the opportunity for infants to match their own experience with theirs. Parents’ initiations of face-to-face play interactions with repetitive gestures, particular vocal intonation, and exaggerated facial expressions are the main course of the social regimen imposed probably to all infants, and at least to all the Western middle-class infants who are overwhelmingly represented in our research. These interactions are typically a running commentary by the parent of how the infant should feel.

Here is a casual observation we made that illustrates the kind of emotional scaffolding young infants are typically provided with in a dyadic context: a father lowers his 2-month-old daughter toward the water surface of a swimming pool. He holds her in a way that he can have a clear view of her face and that she can see his face in full view. While staring at her intensely, the father gently lets one of her bare feet touch the water and briskly removes it while commenting with a loud, high-pitched voice, “Oootch it’s cold!” In the meantime, he displays a greatly exaggerated expression of pain. This routine is repeated many times in a row, with appropriate pause allowing the infant to regain her calm.

In this observation, the parent creates an emotionally charged context in anticipation of particular feelings in his infant (fear, pleasure, surprise, etc.). He monitors the child to capture the expression of the anticipated feeling in order to echo its expression in an easily discriminable (exaggerated) and contingent manner. It is as if the father is interviewing his daughter to check on her feelings and to create a situation in which he can show empathy and demonstrate his sheer pleasure in being with her. It is doubtful that the father wants to give his daughter her first swimming lesson or to teach her about temperature, liquid, or the dangers of water. Note that this demonstration of empathy requires intimate, one-to-one contacts. It mobilizes the full attention of the adult and requires a great sense of timing and monitoring. What is remarkable is that the vast majority of parents demonstrate a natural talent for highly sophisticated interactional skills with their infant, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Origins of Social Cognition
• Part II: Early Sensitivity to Social Contingencies
• Part III: Early Monitoring of Others
• Part IV: Commentary
• Author Index
• Subject Index