Julia Prein, Manuel Bohn, Daniel Haun Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
In order to explain and predict the behavior of agents, we use social cognition: we represent and reason about other’s perspectives, knowledge, intentions, beliefs, and preferences. Much research has been devoted to studying the average age at which certain social-cognitive abilities emerge in development. However, traditional measures of social cognition (e.g., false belief change-of-location tasks) do not have satisfactory psychometric properties and are not designed to capture individual differences between children. We argue that a systematic individual differences perspective on social-cognitive development is needed. To approach this issue, we designed an interactive web interface to study individual differences in social cognition in young children and adults. This novel task assesses the participant’s ability to follow an agent’s gaze, using a continuous spatial layout. Furthermore, we formalize the process of gaze following in a computational cognitive model that allows us to conceptualize and interpret individual differences in a psychologically meaningful way. The key parameter in our model is an inferential component, which describes how accurate the participant is in inferring the target’s location based on the agent’s gaze. In addition, the model estimates the probability that the participant uses the available gaze information or engages in random guessing. We validate our task and the model in 7 studies with adults (N = 285) and children between 3 and 5 years of age (N = 240). Taken together, this work illustrates how method and (formal) theory development can go hand in hand to shed light on the development of social cognition.
