This level of analysis may be applied to any content area within social psychology, including research on intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup processes.
Social cognition therefore applies and extends many themes, theories, and paradigms from cognitive psychology that can be identified in reasoning (representativeness heuristic, base rate fallacy and confirmation bias), attention (automaticity and priming) and memory (schemas, primacy and recency).
According to the received view in cognitive sciences, the development of the human ability to process, store, and apply information about others begins in social learning at the onset of life.
The essential question in studying Social cognition is how this ability appears and what neurophysiological processes underlie it in organisms in the sensorimotor stage of development with only simple reflexes which do not maintain bilateral communication.
Professor Michael Tomasello introduced the psychological construct of shared intentionality to explain cognition beginning in the earlier developmental stage through unaware collaboration in mother-child dyads.
Sometimes inconsistent information is sub-categorized and stored away as a special case, leaving the original schema intact without any alterations.
[citation needed] Whether a person will successfully regulate the application of the activated schemas is dependent on individual differences in self-regulatory ability and the presence of situational impairments to executive control.
[citation needed] High self-regulatory ability and the lack of situational impairments on executive functioning increase the likelihood that individuals will successfully inhibit the influence of automatically activated schemas on their thinking and social behavior.
This phenomenon, known as pareidolia, is thought to be an evolutionary adaptation that helps humans quickly identify potential threats and allies in their environment.
[39] Point-light walkers are animations of people walking that are created by attaching small lights to their joints and recording their movements in a dark room.
Despite lacking details such as clothing or facial features, humans are able to accurately perceive the gender, emotion, and identity of the walker from these animations.
The prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in higher-level cognitive processes such as decision-making and social behavior, has undergone significant expansion in humans compared to other primates.
For example, one study interviewed a Scottish settler and a Bantu herdsman from Swaziland and compared their schemas about cattle.
Cultural influences have been found to shape some of the basic ways in which people automatically perceive and think about their environment.
[43] For example, a number of studies have found that people who grow up in East Asian cultures such as China and Japan tend to develop holistic thinking styles, whereas people brought up in Western cultures like Australia and the USA tend to develop analytic thinking styles.
In this study, the Eastern holistic thinking style (and focus on the overall context) was attributed to the busier nature of the Japanese physical environment.
[49][50] Early interest in the relationship between brain function and social cognition includes the case of Phineas Gage, whose behaviour was reported to have changed after an accident damaged one or both of his frontal lobes.
For example, damage to the frontal lobes can affect emotional responses to social stimuli[51][52][53] and performance on theory of mind tasks.
For example, it has been suggested that some aspects of psychological processes that promote social behavior (such as facial recognition) may be innate.
[citation needed] Consistent with this, very young babies recognize and selectively respond to social stimuli such as the voice, face and scent of their mother.
Numerous hyper-scanning research studies in adults[31][32][33][34] and mother-child dyads[68] support the shared intentionality nature of social behavior in young children (see the section Development).