Social Cognitive Development: A New Look

—This article showcases exciting new work in the burgeoning area of social cognitive development, particularly work that uses the methods of cognitive development to illuminate socially relevant mental representations and mental processes. The authors focus on key aspects of children’s emerging social judgments and social representations, examining their judgments of goodness, their evaluations of similar and dissimilar others, and their representations of social relationships. The authors also show how researchers using methods from other fields, such as adult social cognition, comparative psychology, and neuroscience, are making important new contact with social cognitive development to shed light on the origins and nature of social representations and social cognitive processes.