Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
Department of Psychology, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK.
Dev Sci. 2020 May;23(3):e12924. doi: 10.1111/desc.12924. Epub 2019 Dec 4.
In this study, we propose that infant social cognition may 'bootstrap' the successive development of domain-general cognition in line with the cultural intelligence hypothesis. Using a longitudinal design, 6-month-old infants (N = 118) were assessed on two basic social cognitive tasks targeting the abilities to share attention with others and understanding other peoples' actions. At 10 months, we measured the quality of the child's social learning environment, indexed by parent's abilities to provide scaffolding behaviors during a problem-solving task. Eight months later, the children were followed up with a cognitive test-battery, including tasks of inhibitory control and working memory. Our results showed that better infant social action understanding interacted with better parental scaffolding skills in predicting simple inhibitory control in toddlerhood. This suggests that infants' who are better at understanding other's actions are also better equipped to make the most of existing social learning opportunities, which in turn may benefit future non-social cognitive outcomes.
在这项研究中，我们提出婴儿的社会认知能力可能会“引导”领域一般性认知的连续发展，这符合文化智力假说。我们采用纵向设计，对 6 个月大的婴儿（N=118）进行了两项基本社会认知任务的评估，旨在评估婴儿与他人分享注意力和理解他人行为的能力。在 10 个月大时，我们测量了儿童的社会学习环境的质量，这是通过父母在解决问题任务中提供支架行为的能力来衡量的。8 个月后，对儿童进行了认知测试，包括抑制控制和工作记忆任务。我们的结果表明，婴儿更好地理解他人的动作与父母更好地提供支架技能相结合，可以预测幼儿期简单的抑制控制能力。这表明，更善于理解他人行为的婴儿也更有能力充分利用现有的社会学习机会，而这反过来又可能有益于未来的非社会认知结果。
