| Abstract: | This study examined the influence of familiarity with peers on social cognition in children. Second- and fourth-grade children were given information about an unfamiliar peer before viewing a videotape of that peer. Children were then instructed to segment the ongoing behavioral stream of the target peer into units by pressing a button. Extrapolating from research on the influence of expert knowledge on cognition, we predicted that children who were given prior information about the peer would break the behavioral stream into fewer, larger segments than would children in no-prior-information control conditions. We also predicted that prior information would exert more influence on the segmentation of fourth graders than that of second graders. Results were consistent with these hypotheses. These and other results are discussed in terms of developmental and contextual influences on social cognition in children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
