Current theorizing in the field of cognitive science embraces the concept that cognitive activity is not centered in the brain alone but is dependent on embodiment and the environment in which it is functioning. A key component of that environment is the presence of others. This article examines the social nature of cognitive activity from a 4E…

A substantial amount of learning in schools takes place within social contexts and class-based group activities; however, social learning situations, communication and social cognition development for children with ASD can be a challenge for the children and their teachers. This paper explores what happens when children with ASD draw…

The current study investigated developmental trajectories of teacher-reported aggressive behavior and whether these trajectories are associated with social-cognitive development (i.e., aggressive problem-solving) across the first three elementary grades in a large sample from Switzerland (N = 1,146). Semiparametric group-based analyses were…

Parents with intellectual disabilities (PID) are overrepresented in the child protective services (CPS) system. This study examined a more nuanced view of the role of cognition in parenting risk. Its goal was to validate a social information processing (SIP) model of child neglect that draws on social cognition research and advances in…

The present study investigates the development of children's ability to make inferences about a peer's mental state. In this study 48 eight-year-old children, 49 ten-year-old children and 44 adults observed and analyzed short video sequences, extracts from a socio-cognitive interaction between two children working on a mathematical task. The…

Two classrooms of first graders (N=40) were administered Damon's moral judgment measure, Shure and Spivack's social problem solving measure, and the Stanford-Binet vocabulary. Concurrently, two observers in the children's school environment recorded incidences of successful resolutions of interactions, amount of derogation, and the number of times…

Investigated differences in achievement of 221 kindergartners with different cognitive tempos. Results suggest that kindergartners who exhibit an impulsive cognitive tempo may be judged by teachers as being less academically and socially competent than other kindergartners. (RJC)

On the basis of two sets of videotaped observations collected on same-sex, same-age and mixed-age dyads composed of children 18 and/or 24 months old, issues concerning research on infants and toddlers are addressed. The first set of observations was a simple description of the structure and content of children's peer interaction during 15 minutes…

Piaget's last works (1975, 1977, and 1980) add a dynamic aspect to his earlier exceptionally formal structural model. He portrays change in more functionalistic terms and describes conflict, referring to the process of perturbations and compensations to explain the regulations of the network of cognitive cycles. He suggests three types of balances…

Examined children's use of the representativeness heuristic with two types of decision problems adapted from research with adults--standard representativeness problems and conjunction fallacy problems. Findings on both problems indicate the use of decision heuristics in the early grade-school years, and suggests these should be the years for…

A new concept, relativistic operations, seems to provide a link between Piagetian theory, information processing theory, logical thought in the new physics, and the nature of adults' problem solving in everyday social situations. Relativistic operations are logical, cognitive operations which can be used as a system to relate, order, and select as…

Examined the developmental sequence through which adolescents progress in solving a physics problem (balance beam ratio and proportion) and a social problem (predicting the behavior of a story character). Although most of the 9- through 19-year-olds performed at predictable and similar developmental stages on each task, a minority were more…

Three groups of sixth, eighth, and tenth graders took pre- and posttests on a Piagetian problem and a problem that evoked a misconception. Two intervention groups engaged in group transactions intended to create inter- and intrapersonal conflicts or took a multiple-choice test. Results indicated that treatment groups progressed on the Piagetian…

Noting that sociocultural approaches to cognitive development provide valuable insights into the influences on learning of relationship and cultural variables, this book discusses recent theory and research on the social context of cognitive development. The book takes the view that the social settings in which children live and grow provide both…

W. M. Gray's "How is Your Logic?" a Piagetian-based, group-administered written test of cognitive development, and B. Leadbeater's Livian Wars Task, a formal operations-based, written, social-cognition problem were given to 348 college undergraduate and graduate students to investigate the impact of chronological age and amount of formal…