Investigating the Development of Social Affiliation Across Infancy and Early Childhood

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Children and infants use social cues not only to guide their own social interactions (e.g., Hamlin et al., 2007; Kinzler et al., 2007), but also their expectations about how other people will affiliate (see Shutts et al., 2013). The presence of this ability early in development suggests that this skill is fundamental to how we learn about and comprehend the social world around us. The purpose of the current symposium is to investigate the different types of social cues used by infants and children to understand third-party social affiliations, the circumstances under which they use these social cues, and the nature of the relationships they infer from these cues. The first paper shows that infants can use collective behaviour, such as synchronous dancing, to categorize animate, but not inanimate, entities into social groups. The second paper demonstrates that exposure to diversity, both linguistic and racial, influences the flexibility of infants’ and children’s expectations of social affiliations, respectively. The third paper shows that children use partiality in resource sharing to infer specific types of social affiliations, such as kinship. Finally, a discussant who is an expert in the field of developmental psychology, in particular early social cognition, will highlight common underlying themes from these three papers and identify future directions for advancing knowledge in this field. Taken together, this symposium will enrich our understanding of the social cues used in infancy and early childhood to aid in social cognition.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Anna Michelle McPhee, University of Toronto

Discussant

• Elizabeth S. Spelke, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• Infants’ use of Shared Utility to Infer Unidirectional and Bidirectional Affiliation - Presenting Author: Lindsey Powell, University of California - San Diego

• Examining the Impact of Exposure to Diversity on Early Social Categorization - Presenting Author: Zoe Liberman, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Investigating the Development of Kinship Detection in Early Childhood - Presenting Author: Anna Michelle McPhee, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Sinamys Bagh, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Mark A Schmuckler, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Jessica A Sommerville, University of Toronto