ABSTRACT
Introduction Social cognition, as a field of inquiry in developmental psychology, has traditionally been defined as the study of how children conceptual ize other people and social relations (Shantz, 1975). Interest in social cognition grew out of earlier concerns among developmentalists with more general problems regarding how children conceptualize object relations. Influenced by the cognitive-stage developmental model of Piaget, early studies of object relations focused on children’s knowl edge of such object properties as space, time, number, weight, volume, etc. When interest shifted in the late 1960s to children’s knowledge of such person properties as feelings, thoughts, needs, and intentions, it seemed reasonable at the time to adapt experimental paradigms from the already empirically established domain of physical or object cogni tion. According to this general paradigm, subjects are interviewed alone by an adult experimenter who administers a series of problems DAVID J. BEARISON. Doctoral Programs in Educational and Developmental Psychol ogy, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, New York, and Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School and The Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts.
