Assessing children’s perceptual sensitivity to social information
Abstract
Recent theories of social-cognitive development have generally focused on the development of theory of mind betweeninfancy and preschool. However, social understanding involves more than developing an inferential understanding of mindand continues beyond the early childhood years. We present preliminary findings from a study that evaluated childrensperceptual sensitivity to subtle kinematic cues that distinguish between intentions in others behaviour, based on Pesquita etal. (2016). On each trial, children observed videos of an actor reaching to touch one of two buttons. On half the trials theactor chose which button to touch and on the other half they were directed. A paired-samples t-test showed that participantswere reliably faster at correctly predicting the actors movement in the chosen condition than the directed condition [t(39)= 6.23, p ¡ .01, Cohens d = 0.99)]. We argue that social understanding comes in various forms and at different levels ofawareness.