What is it about?
Children’s abilities to judge what people are thinking and feeling as they observe them in social interactions continues to improve over the course of development. We created a novel classroom-based computerized learning activity, called SEE+, for children to watch animated social scenarios and infer what the characters were doing, thinking and feelings. We found, SEE+ enhanced 7- to 10-year-olds’ ability to recognise the emotions and decode the feelings of the animated characters more than real children from the tasks we used.
Featured Image
Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The SEE+ computerised classroom-based training was associated with the equivalent of 4–6 months improvement in performance on the socio-emotional tasks we used. This pointed to the relative plasticity of younger children’s socio-emotional cognition and provides evidence that SEE+ could be an easy-to-use cost-effective resource for teachers to embed in their school social and emotional learning curriculum.
Perspectives
This article is the outcome of collaboration between the co-authors and educators in 87 schools in England as part of the Unlocke project (https://unLocke.org/) within the emerging transdisciplinary field of educational neuroscience. In reading this paper, I hope it exemplifies for you the contribution we may make together in supporting children’s development of smooth social interactions during their formal years of education.
Dr Sveta Mayer
University College London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: SEE+ computerized classroom-based training enhances 7- to 10-year-olds' socio-emotional cognition through observation and inference, PLOS One, September 2025, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0330934.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
