Developmental psychologists have devoted significant attention to investigating how children learn from others' actions, emotions, and testimony. Yet most of this research has examined children's socially guided learning about artifacts. The present article focuses on a domain that has received limited attention from those interested in the…

Young children's persuasion tactics, and how these reflected attunement to others' mental states, were explored in archived longitudinal samples of transcribed at-home conversations of four children, three to five years old. Over 87,000 utterances were examined to identify conversation "chunks" involving persuasion; 1,307 chunks were then coded…

The importance of eye gaze as a means of communication is indisputable. However, there is debate about whether there is a dedicated neural module, which functions as an eye gaze detector and when infants are able to use eye gaze cues in a referential way. The application of neuroscience methodologies to developmental psychology has provided new…

We argue for the importance of processes of shared intentionality in children's early cognitive development. We look briefly at four important social-cognitive skills and how they are transformed by shared intentionality. In each case, we look first at a kind of individualistic version of the skill--as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of…

The authors propose a heuristic model of the social outcomes of childhood brain disorder that draws on models and methods from both the emerging field of social cognitive neuroscience and the study of social competence in developmental psychology/psychopathology. The heuristic model characterizes the relationships between social adjustment, peer…

An attempt to formulate a model of social cognition which will describe what may be involved in making social cognitive inferences in children. Techniques for intervention are then derived from the model. (Author/NG)

Discusses two related problems generated by Piaget's psychology of decentered knowing. Subjectivity, consciousness, and self-consciousness are ruled out; the dynamic transformation of society through history is reduced to triviality. (Author/DB)

Research in developmental social cognition should detail commonalities between self and other as well as the self-other differentiation process. A method which indexed developmental changes in the understanding of both intersubjective rules of interpersonal behavior and subjective individual perspectives was devised to research questions…

Defining social cognition as our attempts to make sense of how people think, perceive, infer, feel, and react, this book examines both the classical issues and contemporary understanding of theory and research in social cognitive development. The initial chapters highlight one of the central, theoretical tensions in the field, which is whether the…

This paper presents the individual's life span trajectory as a unique construction within a unique context for that individual's interactional and adaptive self-regulatory strategies. Issues of adaptive coordination between caregiver and infant are discussed, and five propositions concerning individual development summarize the work. (Author/JDD)

L. S. Vygotsky's book "Mind in Society" was published more than 50 years ago in Russia, but it is now being recognized as relevant to contemporary research in child development because of the areas of investigation that he suggested. Vygotsky views children as active participants in their own learning and suggests that researchers…