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，这些任务和程序将服务于一个更大的研究项目，解决与发展社会理解有关的合作同伴互动的早期发展。与同伴合作玩耍是儿童获得社交、沟通和互动技能的主要环境，在这种环境中，他们开始理解和利用他人的意图、欲望和精神状态来预测和调节自己和他人的行为。尽管在描述婴幼儿的社会理解方面已经取得了很大的进步，但实际上还没有研究如何将这种发展中的理解运用到与其他孩子的社会互动中。申请人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，以及它与自我和他人的社会理解发展的关系。本建议中所述的特别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性研究。本研究有两个具体目标：1)为1 - 2岁儿童开发和测试一套新的同伴合作程序，这些程序具有激励作用，在认知和运动上简单，易于实现，并且在实现这些程序所需的社会理解的本质上是渐进的；2)扩展和修改从其他人用来评估幼儿自我和他者意识平行发展的任务中衍生出来的程序，并检验关于它们的一致性和结构效度的假设，以及它们与年龄的关联。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，以及最近在其他人的研究中出现的方法。提出了一系列连续的五个横断面研究来测试和评估这些任务。每项研究将包括18个月和24个月大的婴儿。

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.