PSY312H5 Chapter 9: The Development of Social Cognition
Document Summary
Intro: as emphasized by sociocultural theories, social relationships have a profound effect on what children do, on what they think about, and on how they think. Social relationships are essential for healthy development and for optimal functioning throughout life. Piaget suggested that during infancy, reality exists primarily at the interface of the child"s actions and the external environment. From this starting point, development proceeds both inward, allowing children to gain a better understanding of themselves, and outward, allowing them to gain a better understanding of the broader world. Infants are highly attentive to human faces and voices. Infants are especially attentive to complex sounds such as human speech, and they are capable of making fine discriminations among the sounds used in human languages. Infants also show a special preference for infant-directed speech, or motherese . From a very young age, infants also seem to expect people to behave differently from objects, and they react differently to people and objects.
