Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Definitions, theories, and plan of the book
- 2 Endogenous and exogenous influences in development
- 3 Animate/inanimate distinction
- 4 Self and consciousness
- 5 Dyadic interactions
- 6 Triadic interactions – Joint engagement in 5 and 7-month-olds
- 7 Social influences on infants' developing sense of people
- 8 Affect attunement and pre-linguistic communication
- 9 The quality of social interaction affects infants' primitive desire reasoning
- 10 Social cognition – affect attunement, imitation, and contingency
- References
- Index
3 - Animate/inanimate distinction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Definitions, theories, and plan of the book
- 2 Endogenous and exogenous influences in development
- 3 Animate/inanimate distinction
- 4 Self and consciousness
- 5 Dyadic interactions
- 6 Triadic interactions – Joint engagement in 5 and 7-month-olds
- 7 Social influences on infants' developing sense of people
- 8 Affect attunement and pre-linguistic communication
- 9 The quality of social interaction affects infants' primitive desire reasoning
- 10 Social cognition – affect attunement, imitation, and contingency
- References
- Index
Summary
Relationship between social and nonsocial cognition
In chapter 2, I argued that infants are born with innate domains that contain representations about people, as well as particular principles on how to interact with them. If that is true, then it follows that infants must have different domains that contain representations of physical objects. That infants have specific domains for interacting with people and objects should not be surprising. People and inanimate objects differ in significant ways, and consequently the rules and regulations on how to interact with the physical domain should be different from those we use to interact with people. This suggests that an understanding of the social and the physical develops differently. In the present chapter, I will discuss the development of the animate/inanimate distinction in infants. Not only does knowing how the animate/inanimate distinction develops in children shed light on the sociality of infants, but as introduced above, it addresses the larger theoretical question of how social and nonsocial cognition are related (Gelman and Spelke, 1981; Glick, 1978). According to domain general theorists, cognition is unitary and people and nonsocial objects come to be known through the same cognitive processes. In brief, Piaget (1952) proposed that infants have abstract domain general principles that initially reveal people as an object among all objects. Through interacting with people infants come to understand them as subjects among objects.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Infants' Sense of PeoplePrecursors to a Theory of Mind, pp. 46 - 71Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005