Social cognitive development during the latency years: an examination of three measures

A host of research has focused on social cognitive development. Still, measurement limitations have hindered progress. Limitations include failures to examine developments in latency aged children and a scarcity of data examining related cognitive skills. We administered three social cognition measures, the Faux Pas Task (FP), the Movie Stills task (MS), and the Animations task, to 64 children between 6-12 years, and assessed children’s verbal ability. Results indicated that chronological age was related to MS and Animations task performance, but not to FP task performance after covarying children’s verbal ability. FP task performance was related to verbal mental age. Individual items of the FP task were separated in difficulty by whether or not they contained a negative word or phrase. Items with a negative word or phrase were answered correctly more often. These results and their implications for future research on social cognitive development are discussed