Social Understanding
Children begin observing behavior patterns of others at an early age.
Studies have shown that even infants not only passively observe other people, but actively interpret their actions and draw conclusions from them.
How do we explore social understanding?
To find out how an understanding of actions develops, we confront children with different scenarios. For example, we observe whether and under what conditions young children imitate other people. Among other things, we also show young children videos of actions and analyze their eye movements, e.g. using eye tracking.
Why is that important?
Social understanding is of great importance in everyday life. Social understanding contributes, among other things, to the fact that small children are slowly becoming able to act together with other people (e.g. solving a task together). Social understanding also plays an important role in adult life, e.g. collisions in traffic can only be avoided if we understand the intentions of others and can predict their actions.