Assignment: Social Cognition Annotated Bibliography Essay
Assignment: Social Cognition Annotated Bibliography Essay
Assignment: Social Cognition Annotated Bibliography Essay
Description
Annotated Bibliography on Social Cognition.
Social cognition is a subtopic of social psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations.
Social cognition concerns the various psychological processes that enable individuals to take advantage of being part of a social group. Of major importance to social cognition are the various social signals that enable us to learn about the world. Such signals include facial expressions, such as fear and disgust, which warn us of danger, and eye gaze direction, which indicate where interesting things can be found. Such signals are particularly important in infant development. Social referencing, for example, refers to the phenomenon in which infants refer to their mothers’ facial expressions to determine whether or not to approach a novel object. We can learn a great deal simply by observing others. Much of this signalling seems to happen automatically and unconsciously on the part of both the sender and the receiver. We can learn to fear a stimulus by observing the response of another, in the absence of awareness of that stimulus. By contrast, learning by instruction, rather than observation, does seem to depend upon awareness of the stimulus, since such learning does not generalize to situations where the stimulus is presented subliminally. Learning by instruction depends upon a meta-cognitive process through which both the sender and the receiver recognize that signals are intended to be signals. An example would be the ‘ostensive’ signals that indicate that what follows are intentional communications. Infants learn more from signals that they recognize to be instructive. I speculate that it is this ability to recognize and learn from instructions rather than mere observation which permitted that advanced ability to benefit from cultural learning that seems to be unique to the human race.
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As currently used, the term ‘cognition’ refers to the many different processes by which creatures understand and make sense of the world. The term does much the same work as was previously done by the term ‘information processing’ and is strongly influenced by developments in computing beginning in the 1940s. Perception, attention, memory and action planning would all be examples of cognitive processes. All these processes are important in social interactions and the study of information processing in a social setting is referred to as social cognition. ‘The goal of social cognition is to provide mechanistic, process-oriented explanations of complex social phenomena’ (Winkielman & Schooler in press). In this paper, I want to consider whether there are aspects of cognition that are specifically social and specifically human.
When we interact with the environment, psychologists have traditionally started from the input. Signals arising from the environment impinge upon us. Sensations are detected by our sense organs such as the eyes. The sensations (e.g. light of a certain wavelength) are turned into perceptions (e.g. the colour of the fruit) on the basis of prior knowledge and current context. Then, decisions are made about what should best be done in response to these perceptions (e.g. Is the fruit ripe? Should I eat it?). Actions are planned and finally output is initiated in the form of motor movements (e.g. grasping the fruit). Within this general framework of stimulus and response, we can have a subset of processes concerned with social stimuli (e.g. reading facial expressions), social decisions (Should I trust this person?) and social responses (making facial expressions)
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