Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The paper discusses the ontogenesis of social interaction by reviewing different studies of fetal voice recognition, mimicry,and twin fetuses co-movement. The review found that fetuses behave socially, but they are unable to do this on their owndue to a lack of understanding social reality, which requires linking certain social cues with corresponding social cases.The article hypothesizes the facilitation of social learning of fetuses through mental interaction with the mother. Thismodality of interaction was explored in 12 online experiments with 67 adults and children. Participants were requiredto translate unfamiliar foreign words themselves (independently), by choosing one correct translation from 10 variants intheir native language in a congruent design and, with the opposite task, in incongruent one. The confederates receivedhints about the correct answers. These online experiments in different languages found evidence of a 98% increase in agroup performance (the p-value 0.001).