• A five year shown a crayon box will expect to find crayons in it. Upon finding candies in the box, he/she will still predict that another child will expect to find crayons in the crayon box.
• From ages 5 to 7 children develop the ability to define stable personality traits.
• A child of 6 or 7 will impute morals based upon outcome. He/she will say that a child who accidentally breaks several dishes is naughtier than the one who deliberately breaks one dish.
• Seven-year-olds’ ideas of self guide them in seeking out information and skills. A child might want to know how fast others can run to compare and perhaps improve his/her own running time.
• Eight-year-olds know that it is difficult, if not impossible, not to think.
• Children 9-10 impute morals based upon intentions. A child of this age will describe the child who breaks one dish intentionally as naughtier than the child who breaks several accidentally.
• Children 10 and older use more psychological words to describe people.

BECOMING SOCIAL THINKERS—ADOLESCENTS

• Adolescents’ descriptions of other people reflect a more advanced theory of mind.
• Adolescents recognize seemingly contradictory personality traits and realize that people have more depth than is what is seen on the surface.
• Children at this age use knowledge of personal characteristics to predict behavior.
• Behavior can be modified when adolescents “mind-reading” abilities are improved.

BECOMING SOCIAL THINKERS—PRESCHOOLERS
• Children at this stage can describe themselves in both physical and psychological terms.
• The theory of mind provides ideas on how to interact with other people.
• Children go from literal meanings to understanding humor, sarcasm, illusion, and interpretation.
• Empathy-related and prosocial behavior emerges.
• Children are able to play role-playing games with others.
• Preschoolers are able to understand others well enough to plan effective arguments based upon others’ beliefs, desires, and intentions.

• Existence—understanding that certain things are part of the social world and possible for one’s own life
• Need—motivation to understand others’ thoughts and emotions
• Inference—ability to understand others’ thoughts and feelings

BECOMING SOCIAL THINKERS—INFANTS

• Learn to pair gestures or facial expressions with voices
• Learn that people have constant sizes, shapes, and faces, and that objects continue to exist when not seen.
• Begin to imitate adults and take an interest in adults who imitate them. One study placed an infant across from two adults.
• Learn to follow an adult’s gaze to see the same object the adult sees, or to point to an object of interest to engage the adult in sharing the view of the same object.
• Begin to learn to “read” people, or understand people’s desires, thoughts, and intentions, and to find ways to affect what adults do.
• Begin to develop self-images and expectations dealing with relationships based upon previous experience.

To reduce the ambiguity of these complex terms, here are simple explanations for each:

• Social-emotional competence is defined as one’s ability to resist reacting impulsively toward something or someone; being aware of one’s own feelings and managing them; accurately perceiving others’ points of view; accurately identifying problems; and suggesting appropriate and positive solutions and goals (Zins, Elias, Greenberg, & Weissberg, 2000). When children demonstrate mastery of these skills, they are said to be socially and emotionally competent.
•  Executive function is defined as the skills necessary to participate in purposeful, goal-directed activities. These skills include the ability to inhibit impulses, shift attention from one task to another, plan, initiate tasks, and utilize working-memory (Luria, 1966; Pennington & Ozonoff, 1996).

You may have recognized that many of the executive function skills and the social-emotional skills are alike, such as problem-solving and resisting impulsive behavior. Why then, is executive functioning not considered to be an integral component of social-emotional interventions? If current research implies that deficiencies in executive functioning are related to difficulties in domains of social-emotional functioning, then intervention programs that promote social-emotional competence should include tasks that strengthen executive functioning.

• Delay of gratification—that is one’s ability to resist immediate gratification for a more valuable outcome at a later time—is related to the social-emotional competence skill of resisting temptation and regulating one’s level of frustration and stress. Children’s [executive] ability to plan and inhibit responses, and to control what to focus on, may directly influence their ability to control their behaviors to comply with social demands, such as when they are expected to delay gratification (Peake, Hebl, & Mischel, 2002).
• A strong theory of mind—defined as a child’s awareness and understanding of others’ mental states and the effect of others’ mental states on their beliefs and behaviors—is necessary for children to comprehend deception as another’s false belief. It is also associated with the executive function skills such as working memory, mental flexibility, inhibitory control, and planning (Carlson & Moses, 2001; Frye, Zelazo, & Palfai, 1995; Hughs, 1998).

So, what’s the point? It’s really quite simple: Don't accept any social skills program that does not include executive functions training.

The "problem" in this case is our hunger. The solution that presents itself is to eat. Our memory tells us that there is food in the kitchen, as there was yesterday. If just one of these automatic cognitive processes is impaired in any way, we can have issues solving this relatively easy task.

Say, for example, you cannot identify the problem. You feel hungry. You have previous experience of being hungry, and your brain tells you what to do about it. However, if you do not associate this hunger with eating, then the problem remains unsolved. If it is memory that is impaired, you have identified the problem as being hungry, and you have identified the solution as finding something to eat, but you have no memory of where the food is or how to get it.

This automatic organization, in normal developing persons, serves to help us start on the learning process. We are then able to take skills learned from experiences and apply them to novel yet similar situations. From the relationship with our parents, we determine the role of adults in our lives, and we then apply our experiences to other situations or experiences. For example, we know that we can’t fit inside a shoe box, so we can apply that fact to reason that the family car does not fit in the fridge.

Although this might seem like a rather fatuous example, for many children with an impairment in their prefrontal cortical development, it is not. Imagine if it were not obvious to you that you could not fit inside a shoe box. Imagine if you could not make the connection between rewards for good behavior and admonishments for bad behavior?

Cognitive organization- the process of arranging objects, events, people, language or even ideas, into a structure that we can understand- begins at a very early age. Preschoolers, for example, will automatically group objects of play together: plastic fork and spoon, or toy tractor and toy truck. They will generally have a very organized behavioral routine around everyday routines (meal times, bed times, etc.).

As many of our executive functions and automatic responses are housed in the prefrontal lobes, prefrontal injury or impairment can negatively influence the control that we have over our cognitive processes. In other words, an imperfect prefrontal cortex impairs the way we "think." It can mean that the ability to “think our way around problems” becomes difficult. We cannot focus on the correct organizational scheme to complete a task.

Our cognitive processes increase in complexity as we mature. We start to associate more concrete physical objects with more conceptual ones. A very young child might put "Grandma" and "cake" together because he or she understands that Grandma bakes cakes. As the child gets older, he or she may associate the word "cake" with "chocolate," a move that symbolizes the transfer between physical and conceptual ideas.

The image of self is usually still underdeveloped by the age of 2. The image of self comes from understanding the world around us and the relationships we have with the people in it. A good example of this is that a 2-year old will often narrate single events that happened to him by referring to himself as an object, usually in the form of "me," such as: "Me fall."

As we grow older, and the cognitive responses start to draw on more experiences and memories; we learn to adapt ourselves to our surroundings in a more self-aware way. By the ages of 3 to 4, we can narrate more events and will begin to address ourselves as “I.”

By the age of 5 we can generally line up events that have happened to us in the correct sequence, as our neural pathways adapt to the sequence of time. By 7 years of age we are generally able to narrate a basic story, with a distinct beginning, middle and end. Our topographic memory has begun to develop; this is the ability to orient ourselves in the space that we occupy, and to follow and recognize a distinct itinerary.

This development is then carried into adolescence, at which point we have enough information about the world around us for our cognitive processes and memory to be in sync. We can then apply our experiences and understanding of “the way things work” to our role in life. If, however, there is impairment somewhere in the development of the prefrontal cortex, this natural progression is hindered.

• Memory: We remember similar situations and how we reacted to them in the past. For example, when faced with the prospect of crossing a road, we remember that we need to look both ways to check that there are no vehicles coming. For the same reason, we remember that we also need to listen for the sounds of vehicles approaching.
• Inhibitory control: The suppression of certain thoughts or fears that might keep us from reaching our goals. In the case of the relatively simple task of crossing the road, we suppress the fear of getting hit by a car. If we let such fears take over our minds we would never reach our goals (i.e., the other side of the road).
• Planning: The ability to visualize how we are to reach our goals. We think of the road, assess the potential obstacles that might stand in our way, and decide how we are going to act.
• Organization: The ability to use a system to arrange our thoughts, such as organizing the different components of a challenging situation.
• Time management: The ability to evaluate the time restraints on any given situation. For example, how long should it take to complete a task?
• Metacognition: The ability to consider ourselves in a more objective way. While tackling a problem, we are able to evaluate its progress and give ourselves an idea of how we are progressing. A good example of this is the completion of tedious tasks. We have all been in the situation where we have had to face a physically, but not mentally challenging situation, like moving a pile of bricks from one side of the garden to the other. We automatically evaluate how we are progressing: “I’ve moved about 20% of the bricks, so I have about 80% left to move.”
• Self-regulation of affect: The ability to manage our emotions in order to control our behavior. Using the example of the menial brick-moving task, we cope with the fact that it is an uninteresting task for the sake of achieving the goal.
• Task initiation: The ability to start a task with enough time in order to get it done. If we really do have to move a pile of bricks from one end of the garden to the other, then we are unlikely to start it at 8 p.m., because we know it would be unsafe to work in the dark.
• Goal-directed persistence: We can visualize our goals, and we have the ability to stay on course with our plans until those goals are met. It also means that we have the ability to ignore distractions until the task is completed.

Most people have the ability to perform all of these executive functions to some degree. The average person will find some of these functions easy and perform them with great success and automaticity. That same person may find other functions more challenging and perform less well on tasks that require a specific type of cognitive ability. For example, a person may become easily distracted while completing a task, but can calculate very well the amount of time required to perform that task based on past performance. Another person may have difficulty in realistically evaluating time constraints for a task, but can devote unwavering attention to the task at hand.

Research in the late 1980’s and 1990’s shed light on autism’s many defects in thinking. Rumsey and Hamburger conducted a study demonstrating dramatic impairments in reasoning that were not accounted for by problems in other skills. The study showed that patients with autism had good performance on tests requiring simple language ability and memory, but moderate to severe impairment in more complex thinking tasks. In 1992 Minshew and others showed that autistic patients performed normally on simple memory tests and tests of basic language, such as word fluency, reading, decoding, and spelling. Memory problems were seen with delayed recall, and language problems were demonstrated on tests of more advanced abilities such as comprehension of sayings, metaphors, and unclear sentences. A pattern emerged showing that simple abilities were normal but complex abilities were not. Deficits in the ability to think with language and use language to shift from one thought to another were also identified.