Social Skills and Social Understanding in Toddlers

描述（由申请人提供）：拟议研究的目的是制定一套任务和程序，将服务于一个更大的研究计划，解决早期发展的合作同伴互动与发展社会理解。与同伴合作游戏是儿童获得社会、沟通和互动技能的主要背景，在这种背景下，他们开始理解和利用他人的意图、愿望和心理状态来预测和调节自己和他人的行为。虽然在描述婴幼儿的社会理解方面取得了很大的进步，但实际上还没有研究如何将这种发展中的理解用于与其他儿童的社会互动。申请人的研究计划的长期目标是了解合作同伴互动的起源和早期发展及其与自我和他人的社会理解发展的关系。本建议中所述的具体研究的目的是确定任务和程序，以便对这些早期发展进行方案研究。本研究有两个具体目标：1）开发和测试一套新的1岁和2岁奥尔兹的同伴合作程序，这些程序具有激励性，认知和运动简单，容易实现，以及在实现这些程序所需的社会理解的性质方面具有进步性; 2）扩展和修改由他人使用的任务衍生的程序，以评估幼儿自我意识和他人意识的平行发展，并检验其一致性和结构效度以及与年龄的关系。拟议的研究将建立在申请人自己过去的研究中使用的方法，以及最近出现在其他人的研究中的方法。一系列的五个连续的横截面研究提出了测试和评估的任务。每项研究将包括18个月和24个月的奥尔兹。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose of the proposed research is to develop a set of tasks and procedures that will serve a larger research program addressing the early development of cooperative peer interaction in relation to developing social understanding. Cooperative play with peers is a primary context in which children acquire social, communicative, and interactive skills and in which they come to understand and use the intentions, desires, and mental states of others to predict and regulate their own and others' behavior. Although great strides are being made in describing social understanding in infants and toddlers, there is virtually no work addressing how this developing understanding is put to work in social interaction with other children. The long-term objective of the applicant's research program is to understand the origins and early development of cooperative peer interaction and its relation to developments in social understanding of both self and others. The aim of the particular research described in this proposal is to establish the tasks and procedures that will permit the programmatic study of these early developments. The proposed research has two specific aims: 1) to develop and test a new set of peer cooperation procedures for one and two year olds that are motivating, cognitively and motorically simple and readily achieved, as well as progressive in the nature of the social understanding required to achieve them; 2) to extend and modify procedures derived from tasks used by others to assess parallel developments in young children's self- and other-awareness, and to test hypotheses about their coherence and construct validity as well as their associations with age. The proposed research will build on methods used in the applicant's own past research, as well as those appearing more recently in others' research. A series of five successive cross-sectional studies is proposed to test and evaluate the tasks. Each study will include 18 and 24 month olds.