ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide an overview of the development of a variety of socio-cognitive processes and procedures1 throughout ontogeny. For many years the received view of social cognition took it for granted that it was based, wholly or primarily, in mindreading abilities – the ability to attribute contentful mental states to others by means of deploying folk psychological theories or by running simulation routines on one’s own mental states. From the late 1970s through the 1990s it would be fair to say that the received view was that everyday social cognition was always based in mental state attribution achieved by theorizing about other minds, simulating other minds, or some combination of the two.
