A large-scale investigation into the foundations and development of social cognition

Aboody, Rotem, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Laura Schulz at MIT and Dr. Elizabeth Bonawitz at Harvard, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist examining how children’s understanding of other minds develops. To share what we know, learn from others, work together, and conduct even simple conversations, we need to consider other people’s mental states—their goals, desires, knowledge, and beliefs. This social cognitive ability to figure out what other people are thinking, and reason about their mental states, matures throughout the preschool years. However, despite the importance of these capacities for teaching, learning, and basic communication, it is still not fully clear how they emerge. Instead, recent work has uncovered a puzzle: while preschoolers have an early grasp of mental states like goals, preferences and desires, they often struggle to reason about what others know or believe. To investigate how different aspects of mental state reasoning emerge, this project will leverage a computational approach to clarify the cognitive capacities required for different mental state reasoning tasks, and validate an updated mental state reasoning battery to assess the development of each capacity. The project will then leverage recent advances in large-scale online developmental science to administer this battery to a large and representative sample of children. Specifically, the NSF-funded online CRADLE infrastructure will enable the project to collect data of unprecedented richness and scale, collecting data from participants worldwide, and following participants longitudinally with ease. Through this project, the fellow will develop new tools and pipelines for online data collection, and will assess whether these new methods enable researchers to recruit more representative samples. These advances will be of broad use to the field of developmental science. By learning more about the development of human social cognition, we can better understand what makes humans such uniquely good teachers, learners, and communicators. This information can help researchers continue improving educational policy, help clinicians better assist individuals who struggle with mental state reasoning, and enable scientists to design artificial intelligences that can better interact with humans. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.