In this project my colleagues Eric Walle (UC Merced), Peter Reschke (Brigham Young University), and I began by reinterpreting three classic developmental social cognition experiments in affective terms, inviting those working in cognitive development to reconsider how important affect and emotions can be for understanding others’ intentions and actions. In fact, we argued that underpinning the skill of understanding others is the ability to appreciate the relationship between the person and the object or task. Our conceptual argument was supported by an observational experiment we carried out.

Further reading:

Reschke, P. Walle, E., & Dukes, D. (2020). Did you mean to do that? Infants use emotional communication to infer and re-enact others’ intended actions. Cognition & Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2020.1745760

Reschke, P. J., Walle, E. A., & Dukes, D. (2017). Interpersonal development in infancy: The interconnectedness of emotion understanding and social cognition. Child Development Perspectives, 11(3), 178-183. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12230