The Early Social Cognition Inventory (ESCI): An examination of its psychometric properties from birth to 47 months
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social cognition refers to a broad range of cognitive processes and skills that allow individuals to interact with and understand others, including a variety of skills from infancy through preschool and beyond, e.g., joint attention, imitation, and belief understanding. However, no measures examine socio-cognitive development from birth through preschool. Current test batteries and parent-report measures focus either on infancy, or toddlerhood through preschool (and beyond). We report six studies in which we developed and tested a new 21-item parent-report measure of social cognition targeting 0-47 months: the Early Social Cognition Inventory (ESCI). Study 1 (N = 295) revealed the ESCI has excellent internal reliability, and a two-factor structure capturing social cognition and age. Study 2 (N = 605) also showed excellent internal reliability and confirmed the two-factor structure. Study 3 (N = 84) found a medium correlation between the ESCI and a researcher-administered social cognition task battery. Study 4 (N = 46) found strong 1-month test-retest reliability. Study 5 found longitudinal stability (6 months: N = 140; 12 months: N = 39), and inter-observer reliability between parents (N = 36) was good, and children's scores increased significantly over 6 and 12 months. Study 6 showed the ESCI was internally reliable within countries (Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Trinidad and Tobago); parent ethnicity; parent education; and age groups from 4-39 months. ESCI scores positively correlated with household income (UK); children with siblings had higher scores; and Australian parents reported lower scores than American, British, and Canadian parents.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it