ABSTRACT
Young children’s social environments typically change in a fluid fashion throughout any given day. For instance, during a single day a young child may be faced with a busy classroom, one-on-one parental interaction, a television character providing testimony, solitary exploration with a preoccupied parent nearby, and so on. Importantly, these different social contexts present different challenges for children’s social cognitive skill set, which supports their social learning. In particular, children must develop and employ social cognitive skills that (a) discern what information is relevant and should be learned in each of these contexts and (b) identify how social interaction can support their learning. Given the range of social contexts experienced by young children, these challenges cannot be overcome by any single, rigid conceptual tool. For instance, an ability to evaluate the reliability of people’s testimony is useful in many social contexts, but alone it is not enough to resolve the range of challenges young children experience. As an example, understanding what a teacher is intending to teach may require attention to the teacher’s use of pedagogical cues, not just understanding whether the teacher is reliable. Thus, in this chapter we argue that children develop a range of social cognitive skills suited to the different social contexts they commonly encounter, and that they employ these skills flexibly to support social learning.
