Social cognitive theory of gender development and differentiation

Human differentiation on the basis of gender is a fundamental phenomenon that affects virtually every aspect of people's daily lives. This article presents the social cognitive theory of gender role development and functioning. It specifies how gender conceptions are constructed from the complex mix of experiences and how they operate in concert with motivational and self-regulatory mechanisms to guide gender-linked conduct throughout the life course. The theory integrates psychological and sociostructural determinants within a unified conceptual structure. In this theoretical perspective, gender conceptions and roles are the product of a broad network of social influences operating interdependently in a variety of societal subsystems. Human evolution provides bodily structures and biological potentialities that permit a range of possibilities rather than dictate a fixed type of gender differentiation. People contribute to their self-development and bring about social changes that define and structure gender relationships through their agentic actions within the interrelated systems of influence.     

Conservation and conversation types: Forms of recognition and cognitive development

While the productive role of social interaction between peers in promoting cognitive development has been clearly established, the communicative processes through which this is achieved is less clearly understood. Earlier work has established that different types of conversation become established between children as they work together on a problem, and that these types have different implications for the progress of a non‐conserver. The paper focuses on the forms of recognition that emerge within these different conversation types. It reports further analyses of a study in which 226 6.5‐ to 7.5‐year‐old children were presented with a Piagetian task of conservation of liquid. Conservers and non‐conservers were asked to discuss in pairs their conflicting answers and agree upon a joint response. Cognitive progress was assessed by pre‐ to post‐test gains. Analyses of the conversational moves made by each of the participants to the conversation indicates that both non‐conservers and conservers not only make characteristic contributions, but that these contributions vary across the conversation types, and hence also relate differentially to the non‐conserver's progress. More detailed qualitative analyses of the different conversation types provide insights into the ways in which different forms of recognition emerge through these interactions. These results are discussed in relation to a socio‐cognitive account of development.     

Asymmetries in peer interaction: The effect of social representations of gender and knowledge asymmetry on children's cognitive development

This study examines the role of social representations of gender and knowledge as sources of asymmetry on the features of children's interactions as well as on their cognitive development. The research was carried through an innovative pre‐test, first interaction, second interaction, post‐test design. One hundred fifty‐nine children of the same age (6.5–7.5 years old) but of different levels of knowledge of a spatial‐transformation task collaborated in same‐sex and opposite‐sex dyads to find a joint solution. In the first interaction, a child less developmentally advanced (NC) had to work with a child more developmentally advanced (TC), whereas in the second interaction of the same gender composition, the same NC had to work with a fresh NC. Cognitive progress was assessed using pre‐test to post‐test gains. The results revealed that the gender composition of the pairs and knowledge asymmetry influence not only the behavioral patterns and strategies that each partner employs in the interaction but also the cognitive outcomes of the children. These findings shed more light to the process through which socio‐cognitive conflict gets resolved, which was considered until now a “black box.” Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social interaction and the development of cognitive operations

This paper presents two experiments to support the general hypothesis that the coordination of actions between individuals promotes the acquisition of cognitive coordinations. The first experiment shows that two children, working together, can successfully perform a task involving spatial coordinations; children of the same age, working alone, are not capable of performing the task. The second experiment shows that subjects who did not possess certain cognitive operations involved in Piaget's conservation of liquids task acquire these operations after having actualized them in a social coordination task.     

Logical relations and comprehension in conversation

This study examines how logical relations (e.g., causality and identity) in spoken discourse affect comprehension. Research on cohesion, which shows that specific unit template structures link discourse and text together, is used to build a model of language comprehension that places template structures at the base of a context comparison operation. Subjects were engaged in ordinary conversation with a confederate trained to produce specific types of logical utterances unobtrusively. The comprehension model predicted that systematically different latencies, topical response, and remedial response of subjects would follow the test items produced by the confederate. The data support the predictions. It is shown that comprehension occurs via one processing path if there is a direct tie between the target item and the immediately prior item in discourse, and a separate processing path if the tie is between the target item and the earlier context. Subject response in conversation is shown to display useful evidence on the nature of comprehension achieved. The findings specify and extend the recent research on the integration of new information into a textual structure.     

Cross-cultural differences in cognitive development: attention to relations and objects

Growing evidence indicates a suite of generalized differences in the attentional and cognitive processing of adults from Eastern and Western cultures. Cognition in Eastern adults is often more relational and in Western adults is more object focused. Three experiments examined whether these differences characterize the cognition of preschool children in the two cultures. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds from the two cultures (N=64) participated in a relational match-to-standard task in two conditions, with simple or richly detailed objects, in which a focus on individual objects may hurt performance. Rich objects, consistent with past research, strongly limited the performance of U.S. children but not Japanese children. In Experiment 2, U.S. and Japanese 4-year-olds (N=72) participated in a visual search task that required them to find a specific object in a cluttered, but organized as a scene, visual field in which object-centric attention might be expected to aid performance and relational attentional pattern may hinder the performance because of relational structure that was poised by the scene. U.S. children outperformed Japanese children. In Experiment 3, 4-year-olds from both cultures (N=36) participated in a visual search task that was similar to Experiment 2 but with randomly placed objects, where there should not be a difference between the performance of two cultures because the relational structure that may be posed by the scene is eliminated. This double-dissociation is discussed in terms of implications for different developmental trajectories, with different developmental subtasks in the two cultures.     

The changing relations of representation and cognitive structure during the development of a cognitive map

In recent years, workers in cognitive science have come to recognize that cognitive structures should not be equated with computational ones. This realization has often been experienced as confusing. It is argued that cognitive science is moving closer to positions defended by genetic epistemologists. The course of development of a cognitive structure consists of two phases. During the first (Piaget's “phenotypic” adaptation), knowledge about successful ways of interacting with the environment is encoded in a relatively unspecialized format. Selected structural aspects of the resulting data base may later form the basis for a specifically appropriate format. It is during the first phase that knowledge about the environment is manifested in a behavioural structure which does not correspond to any computational entity. In the second phase, the internalized structure becomes computationally defined, which improves the system's efficiency. These ideas are illustrated with the Traveller, a detailed computational model of cognitive map development.     

Individual differences in cognitive representations of action influence the activation of goal concepts

Goal representations play a key role in various psychological processes, including behavioral regulation, self-perception and social understanding. Research on cognitive representations of action has identified individual differences in the general tendency to construe actions in terms of their goal (vs. movement parameters), which can be reliably assessed with the Behavior Identification Form (BIF). The aim of the present study was to examine how individual differences in action identification, as measured by the BIF, affect online processing of action in a laboratory study. The main results showed that the level of action identification predicted participants' performance in a task designed to implicitly assess people's automatic processing of action regarding goal features. We discussed the possible role of impaired goal processing in psychological dysfunctions.     

Social influences on cognitive strategies and cognitive development: The role of communication and instruction

Cognitive strategy training has been shown empirically to be extremely effective in enhancing learning and memory performance in retarded individuals. However, the theoretical status and applied utility of the strategy concept has been subjected to increasing criticism, particularly regarding the lack of definition and specificity in its use, when it is involved in instructional procedures applied to typical learning and information processing tasks. Extensions of research in language and communication provide a social basis for analyzing instruction, in terms of communication theory and pragmatics, and a possible approach to more general studies of the skills and strategies of information processing. The question arises whether rather disparate views of cognitive processing systems can be synthesized, or, by their mutual consideration, at least provide a basis for clearer articulation of research issues. A synthesis of prominent usages of the “strategic processing” construct derived from the social basis of communication theory is advanced.     

Tree representations of ternary relations

In recent years there has been a growing interest in representing data by trees. Most of the literature has been concerned with inferring trees from pairwise data. In this paper, trees are constructed from ternary relations; the model represents each object of an empirical set by a node of a tree so that a betweenness relation among the nodes (the node b is on the path from the node a to the node c) in the graph reflects a ternary relation among the objects. Various systems of formal properties that lead to three different kinds of tree representation are investigated.     

Social cognitive development in resolutions of misunderstandings

Dyads of Ss from six age groups (range 7 to 22 years) were induced to misunderstand each other in each of three conditions: 1. Biased encoding in the speaker. 2. Biased decoding in the listener. J. Biases in both speaker and listener. Young Ss explained faulty behavior and attributed responsibility be reference to listeners, older Ss explained by reference to listeners and attributed responsibility to speakers. An increase of insight into listeners' bias was shown throughout the age span, whereas speakers' bias was not mentioned in Ss' explanations. The results were interpreted in terms of development of differentiation and integration of the social roles of speakers and listeners.     

Social marking,socio-cognitive conflict and cognitive development

This study is concerned with assessing whether social marking, i.e. the correspondence between the cognitive solution of a task and the social relation expressed in the material, is a mechanism of cognitive progress which depends on specific forms of socio-cognitive conflict or on presence of familiar social relations in the material. In the first experiment 5-6-year-old non-conserver children were selected during a pre-test that comprised three spatial transformation tasks. During the test phase, 56 children worked on spatial transformation tasks with an adult partner in four socially marked conditions in which the correctness of the adult model varied. All subjects were individually post-tested on the same tasks with unmarked content. Results showed that, under the same marked conditions in the test phase, more progress took place, at the post-test phase, when subjects had interacted with an incorrect adult model than when they had interacted with a correct one. In the second experiment the hypothesis of an interaction between the nature of the material and the kind of social interaction was examined by means of a factorial design in which the factors were adult versus child partner and marked versus unmarked material. The procedures in the pre- and post-test phase were carried out in the same way as in Experiment I. In the test phase 61 non-conserver children interacted with partners who presented completely incorrect model. The results of post-test phase indicated that there was a main effect of social marking although findings of a condition in which children interact with another child on unmarked material also have shown a certain amount of progress. The findings are discussed with respect to the psycho-social model of cognitive development.     

Social cognitive predictors of peer acceptance at age 5 and the moderating effects of gender

In this study we examined the effects of social intelligence, empathy, verbal ability and appearance‐reality distinction on the level of peer acceptance, as well as the moderating role of gender. Participants were 98 five‐year‐old children (43 boys and 55 girls; mean age 5 years 3 months for boys and girls). Our results showed a main effect of social intelligence on peer acceptance, as well as several other effects that were moderated by gender: a significant and positive effect of verbal ability on social acceptance was found for boys; appearance‐reality distinction was found to have a positive effect on social acceptance in the case of girls; and although empathy had a significant positive effect on social acceptance for both boys and girls, this effect was more pronounced among boys. Our results suggest that abilities promoting peer acceptance are different for boys and girls.     

Mental representations of spatial and nonspatial relations

Four experiments investigated the representation and integration in memory of spatial and nonspatial relations. Subjects learned two-dimensional spatial arrays in which critical pairs of object names were semantically related (Experiment 1), semantically and episodically related (Experiment 2), or just episodically related (Experiments 3a and 3b). Episodic relatedness was established in a paired-associate learning task that preceded array learning. After learning an array, subjects participated in two tasks: item recognition, in which the measure of interest was priming; and distance estimation. Priming in item recognition was sensitive to the Euclidean distance between object names and, for neighbouring locations, to nonspatial relations. Errors in distance estimations varied as a function of distance but were unaffected by nonspatial relations. These and other results indicated that nonspatial relations influenced the probability of encoding spatial relations between locations but did not lead to distorted spatial memories.     

Accessing the asymmetrical representations of causal relations and hierarchical relations in semantic memory

In a speeded aiming task, participants were trained to move a cursor with a mouse from a start position to target locations when the mouse–cursor relationships were either normal or reversed (vertically, horizontally, or both vertically and horizontally). Testing, which occurred after a 5-min delay, involved either the same or a different reversal condition. Response times improved across training, but no transfer occurred when reversal conditions were changed between training and testing. Specificity of training effects extended even to performance with the highly familiar normal mouse. Normal mouse use was slowed by a factor of two to three with training on a reversed mouse although the effect was transient in that case. To contend with a reversed mouse, participants apparently adopt a global inhibition strategy, suppressing all normal movements (and replacing them with sensorimotor remapped movements) but disinhibiting movements along any nonreversed dimension (selectively disengaging the sensorimotor remapping).     

Social and cognitive aspects of the development of aggression in infancy

This article addresses theoretical and methodological problems in the study of aggression in infants and toddlers. It is argued that the occurrence of aggressive behavior in very young children must be considered against the background of their developing social competence. As a result, evidence for the infants' capacities to act with specific intentions and the infants' knowledge of the other as a distinctive individual having his own plans and goals are reviewed. Studies of early social interactions in humans are then examined with special emphasis on cognitive development and social cognition. Finally, the problem of dominance in very young children's groups is considered.