Join the Developmental Psychology area for a talk by Adena Schachner (University of California, San Diego)!
Title: Traces of our past: Children’s social reasoning from the inanimate world
Abstract: Standard accounts of social cognition focus on how people read observable agents, inferring others’ goals, beliefs, and preferences from their faces, bodies, and behavior. I argue that this picture is incomplete. Human behavior leaves traces in the physical world, and from early in life, children use these traces to extract rich social information from the inanimate environment — a capacity I call intuitive archaeology. By combining intuitive physics with social-causal reasoning, children can reconstruct past actions, detect others’ prior presence, and infer mental states from physical evidence alone. In this talk, I will present three lines of research examining the scope of this ability, spanning different aspects of the physical world. First, I provide evidence that children as young as four years use causal inference to detect when one person has copied another’s design, reasoning about the events that caused objects’ features. Second, I show that by age 6, children “read the room”: They understand how objects’ locations in a living space jointly reflect their owners’ preferences and social contexts. Third, I ask if this reasoning occurs on a larger scale, and show that children and adults use protective architectural features of towns (e.g. fences, walls) to make systematic inferences about residents’ traits, mental states, and societal structures. Together, these findings suggest that social and physical cognition are deeply integrated, and that the inanimate world serves as a rich source of social information that humans intuitively both write and read.
The Developmental Seminar Series area features both internal and external speakers who are experts in a wide range of topics including the development of cognition, perception, learning, emotional processing, and social relationships.
For more information, contact Developmental Psychology area coordinator Zeynep Saygin.