Psychoblog

Dear colleagues,

We (as the Department of Developmental Psychology) would like to invite you to a talk by Tobias Schuwerk (LMU München) on Thursday, 19 December 2019 at 12.15 (seminar room 2.111, Waldweg 26). In his talk, Dr. Schuwerk will speak about “Social Cognition and Social Interaction in Typical and Atypical Development.”

We are looking forward to seeing you at our colloquium.

Best wishes,
Feride N. Haskaraca Kizilay

Abstract: 

Social Cognition and Social Interaction in Typical and Atypical Development
Tobias Schuwerk

Theory of Mind or mentalizing, the ability to attribute mental states to others and oneself, is considered being the bedrock of successful social interaction. Recent empirical evidence suggests that in typical development already infants are able to attribute false beliefs to others, a milestone of Theory of Mind development. In autism, it is hypothesized that difficulties in social interaction and communication arise from atypical mentalizing abilities. In the first part of this talk, I will (1) present empirical evidence that casts doubt on the assumption that already infants have a full-fledged Theory of Mind and (2) sketch a way out of the current replication crisis which is taken by the multi-lab project „ManyBabies 2“. In the second part of the talk, I will present data on how children and adults with autism perform in spontaneous mentalizing tasks borrowed from infancy research. The findings show that differences to non-autistic comparison groups are  only subtle and point to fast learning from experience. In the remainder of the talk, I will present a study testing the scope and ecological  validity of current social cognitive theories of autism by investigating  the link between autistic traits and actual mentalizing (assessed via  smartphone-based experience sampling) and social interaction (assessed  via logging of smartphone usage behavior) during everyday life.