Abstract

Social nature is a characteristic that many species of living organisms might share. However, humans have a series of features which sets them apart from any other living species, such as thinking about others’ intentions and actions and the ability to think about their inner world. How this social trait is developed and how its development trajectory occurs have been a topic of interest for social sciences and social neuroscience since the past decades. Social cognition, behavior, and brain are concepts that come to light in order to disentangle this theme. This chapter addresses the timeline of social functioning development during childhood, focusing mainly on behaviors that could be understood as building blocks for more complex social behaviors acquired later in life. According to this aim, we will describe how abilities such as biological motion preference, perception of faces, mutual gaze, gaze following, joint attention, perspective taking, mentalization, and decision making are crucial for the development of social skills during childhood. Furthermore, we will review neurobiological mechanisms related to early social development through the analysis of biological markers present in electroencephalography and imaging studies. We will analyze how social development might deviate from the expected course in disorders such as autism and attentional deficit disorder as well as how conditions such as blindness, deafness, and specific language impairment could impact social development. We highlight how an integrative understanding of development contributes to a better comprehension of human social development functioning inasmuch as it considers it an ever-increasing complexity phenomenon.