Network cognition in preschool

• In Event: Social Relationships in Preschool and Primary School

Abstract

What does it mean to say someone is “popular”? When we characterize a person (a node in network terms) as “popular,” are we referring to the number of their actual friends or the friends they are perceived as having by the other members of the network? This same query applies to social status. Is high status a property of the people at the top of an objective social hierarchy, or is it a property of the people who are perceived to be at the top? Is status an objective trait or does it only exist in the eyes of the beholders?

William James recognized that the social networks that matter most might be the ones that are constructed in the minds of the network members. However, cognitive social structures - the networks we construct in our minds – are far more difficult to observe than objective social networks. The network can be mapped by asking each member of a group to nominate their friends, but cognitive social structures require that we ask the member to also nominate the friends of their own friends and even the friends of those who are not their friends. This daunting requirement has limited research almost entirely to adults. Neal et al. (2014, 2016) also examine classroom network representations in middle childhood. We extended this line of research to two classrooms of Bulgarian children, ages three (N=11) and five (N=13).

We asked each child, in a private location, to name the classmate with whom they played most often. We then asked the child to name a second friend with whom they played most often until all the child’s friends had been nominated. Next, using this same sequential format, we asked the child to name each of the classmates with whom their friend played most often. Finally, we asked the child to name each of the classmates with whom each of the remaining children in the classroom played most often. Repeating this procedure for every child in the classroom produced a map of the first-order social network of nominated friends, but more importantly, it also produced a set of second-order cognitive representations of the social network, one for each child. Each child could then be scored for accuracy by comparing their second-order network with the “ground truth” first-order network.

The younger group were three times more likely than chance to correctly identify the directed network edges, and the older group were five times more likely than chance. Note that none of the children had been prompted previously to attend to these friendships, nor did they have any apparent purposive goal for collecting and storing over 100 pairwise relations in their classroom. Thus, the representation of social networks is robust early in development.

Authors

• Stanka A Fitneva, Queen’s University at Kingston
  Presenting Author

• Michael W. Macy, Cornell University