About this session

Saturday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

New methods to investigate early emerging social understanding in infancy and early childhood

Humans are social creatures, but capturing early social understanding in infants and young children is challenging due to their limited verbal abilities. The methodology to study early social development has evolved from behavioral observation to a more diverse and multifaceted approach, driven by advancement in technologies. This symposium aims to give an overview of these new methods that have emerged in recent years to investigate social understanding in infants and young children.

The first talk presents a new online method to assess infants’ social responses with interactive videos and a holistic behavior coding scale. This approach allows for larger, more diverse samples and enhances data sharing and reproducibility. The second talk reviews how to use body posture as an objective measure of young children’s subjective experience of emotions. This method complements facial expressions and can be done with standard cameras (not specialized cameras), making it accessible for researchers. The third talk introduces a new method of incorporating caregivers into study stimuli using video-editing techniques to assess infants' social understanding. This approach enables researchers to study how infants think and reason about their caregivers and relationships beyond attachment and infants’ understanding of unfamiliar agents. The fourth talk focuses on how to apply EEG to examine infants’ social group understanding. EEG allows distinguishing cognitive and affective mechanisms behind ingroup preferences, which are often difficult to tease apart via only behavioral methods.

This symposium will help introduce advancements in studying early social understanding that other developmental psychologists can apply to their research.

Paper #1
Title	New online method to assess infants' social responses
Presenting author	Dr. Yiyi Wang, University of Chicago, United States

Paper #2
Title	Examining children’s body posture as an objective measure of children’s subjective experience of positive emotions
Presenting author	Robert Hepach, Ph.D., University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Paper #3
Title	New method of incorporating caregivers to assess infants' social understanding
Presenting author	Dr. Ashley J. Thomas, Ph.D., Harvard University, United States

Paper #4
Title	How EEG can provide novel insights into infants’ social group understanding
Presenting author	Dr. Hyesung Grace Hwang, Ph.D., University of California Santa Cruz, United States

View all paper details

Session chairs
Dr. Hyesung Grace Hwang, Ph.D., University of California Santa Cruz, United States; Dr. Yiyi Wang, , United States

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