Current Directions in Social Cognition Research from a Developmental Perspective

Social cognition has been an especially popular area of investigation for developmental psychologists, cognitive scientists, education researchers and developmental neuroscientists in the past four decades. What has started out as a quest to understand children's developing perspective taking abilities in the 80s has evolved into a lively and multi-faceted area of research. In this course, we will focus on lines of social cognition research in the last five years. Some examples of these research areas include: - Cultural differences in conceptualizations of epistemologies, - Scaffolding perspective-taking through mental state talk, - Taking perspective on false, conflicting, and diverse beliefs, - Taking perspective on self in time (e.g., episodic foresight), - Perspective-taking in problem-solving (hypothetical and counter-factual thought) - Learning and Scientific Thought (i.e., text comprehension, scientific thinking)