Lockdowns. Social distancing. Shuttered schools and businesses. The COVID-19 pandemic and its sweeping disruptions set off a stampede of “what it’s doing to us” research, focused largely on schoolchildren. How were students’ academics affected? Their mental health? Their social development?
Left unexamined was whether the pandemic impacted the social cognition of preschool children — kids younger than 6 — whose social norms were upended by day care closures and families sheltered at home.
That changed when a UC Merced research team, looking at data it had started to gather before the pandemic, discovered children ages 3½ to 5½ tested before and after COVID lockdowns revealed a significant gap in a key cognitive skill, particularly for children from homes with low financial resources and adults with less education.
“It was remarkable to see the drop in kids’ performance,” said developmental psychology Professor Rose Scott, a member of the university's Health Sciences Research Institute and lead author of the study published in Scientific Reports . “On one of the tasks in my lab, children tested before the pandemic could pass at 2 and a half years old. Right after the lockdowns, we were seeing 5-year-olds not passing it.”
The UC Merced team — including graduate students Gabriel Nguyentran and James Sullivan, who co-authored the study — tested the children for a social cognition skill called false-belief understanding — the ability to recognize other people can be wrong As a crucial step in distinguishing the mind from reality, false-belief understanding can play a vital role in developing social cooperation, communication and learning.
There were 94 children in the first group tested. Each was given three false-belief tasks. In one task, the child watched as a puppet named Piggy put a toy in one of two containers and leave the stage. A second puppet appeared and moved the toy to the other container. Piggy returned. The child was asked where Piggy would look for the toy. If the child’s false-belief skills were in place, they would say Piggy would choose the first container, though the child knew the toy wasn’t there.
