Alan Page Fiske has made a strong empirical case that social cognition is structured by four elementary mental schemata, the “relational models”. Fiske argues that the four models are innate, and he thus concludes that they are encoded in the genome. But work on self-organization suggests that biological structures can be innate without being genetically encoded. Plausibly, the four models result from principles of self-organization, specifically a sequence of symmetry-breaking bifurcations. The evidence for this lies in the fact that the four models can be arranged in a sequence from more-to-less symmetrical, exemplifying a chain of descending subgroups. This formal property is commonly observed in self-organizing systems. Furthermore, the less symmetrical the model, the later it first appears in childhood. This is analogous to embryonic development in which the organism begins in a highly symmetrical state and develops into a less symmetrical one, plausibly due to a sequence of symmetry breakings. It is also analogous to the acquisition of syntax, in which it has been argued that the initial state of the language faculty is highly symmetrical and hence relatively simple, with syntactic complexity partly deriving from a sequence of symmetry breakings plus interactions with other mental faculties. Explaining complexity in terms of symmetry breaking and interaction with other mental faculties can also plausibly be applied to social cognition, suggesting a parallel with minimalism in syntactic theory.

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Recent studies have demonstrated that 6-month-olds perceive manual actions as object-directed (Woodward, 1999) — and that 8-, but not 6-month-olds, apply this interpretation even to unfamiliar actions if these produce salient object-directed effects (Kiràly, Jovanovic, Prinz, Aschersleben, & Gergely, 2003). The present study had two objectives. First, we tested the alternative interpretation that action effects result in a general increase of attention by testing infants with an analogous paradigm, including however a non-human agent. Second, we investigated in how far the negative findings for the 6-month-olds reported in the study by Kiràly et al. (2003) might be due to the familiarity of the action or the discriminability of the objects involved. The results indicate that adding effects to both a familiar and an unfamiliar action leads even 6-month-olds to interpret the respective action as object-directed, given that the objects are well discriminable. However, infants do not apply such an interpretation to actions of a non-human agent.

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This study examined young children’s understanding of apparent crying and its potentially misleading consequences. Gross and Harris (1988) showed that 6-year-olds can understand that one can simulate an emotion while feeling another, and that such a display can mislead others. In this study, 69 children aged 4, 5, and 6 were given “crying tasks” and “Standard and Second-order False Belief tasks”. In “crying tasks”, participants were asked to identify whether the protagonist was actually crying, and whether the other character believed that the protagonist was actually crying. The results indicate that children’s understanding of apparent crying develops between the ages of 4 and 6. However, most of the children did not understand its misleading consequences. Furthermore, relationships were found between the understanding of apparent crying and the False Belief tasks. This finding suggests that the development of young children’s understanding of apparent crying relates to the development of theory of mind.

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The present study examined whether young children’s behaviors in the Dimensional Change Card Sorting task (DCCS task) could be influenced by their observation of another person performing the task on video. In Experiment 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children observed that an actor on video was sorting cards according to one rule (e.g., shape rule). Then they were asked to sort the cards according to the other rule (e.g., color rule). Result showed that 3-year-olds failed to use the second rule whereas 4- and 5-year-olds used the second rule. Experiments 2 further investigated whether children’s performance following the televised demonstration was different from their performance following the live demonstration of the same actions. Results showed that 3-year-old children failed to use the second rule in spite of the presentation modality (live or video). We conclude that disinhibition can transmit from television to children as it transmits from one person to children.

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Clear and observable social referencing behavior only emerges when infants are old enough to regulate their own behavior according to adult's emotional messages, but like the findings from other studies on infants' social looking behavior, infants before their first birthday may demonstrate gradual change in their referential looking behavior. In this paper, we attempted to examine possible developmental changes in the infants' referential looking behavior at 7 and 9 months, especially in terms of where and whom they look to for referencing. By analyzing the looks in the particular sequence to referees, we found that infants became more willing to look at a familiarized stranger's face as well as mother's body, as they got older. This might suggest a qualitative change in the referential looking behavior during this period of infancy.

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Our purpose is to investigate the key elements for representing personal presence, which is the sense of being with a certain individual. A case study is reported in which children performed daily conversational tasks with a geminoid, a teleoperated android robot that resembles a living individual. Different responses to the geminoid and the original person are examined, especially concentrating on the case where the target child was the daughter of the geminoid source. Results showed that children gradually became adapted to conversation with the geminoid, but the operator’s personal presence was not completely represented. Further research topics on the adaptation process to androids and on seeking for the key elements on personal presence are discussed.

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