Social Interaction in Knowledge Acquisition: Advanced Curriculum. Critical Review of Studies Relevant to Social Behavior of Infants

The question of the acquisition of the first social phenomena by newborns is a crucial issue both in understanding the mental development and the ontogenesis of social interaction. The review attempts to investigate other researches that observe social behavior in studies with no communication between subjects. This current analysis reviews several studies on social phenomena -- categorization of words, preference of faces and even race -- in newborns and 3- to 4-month-olds infants and complements their findings. The review states that newborns and young infants are not able to independently classify phenomena from social reality and perceptually interact with adults effectively enough to understand the meanings of social phenomena on their own. The review concludes that the social behavior of infants is driven by adult social learning through non-perceptual social interaction between them. This thesis is supported by the recent review on social behavior of infants and the experiments on language acquisition of adults, where it is also shown the increase of group performance provided by such unconscious mental collaboration. The long-term study of non-perceptual social interaction could form the basis of the advanced curriculum that can efficiently introduce new knowledge into the long-term memory domain of students to facilitate and accelerate their learning. [This paper was published in: "ComputationWorld 2020: Phase 1 - Preliminary Proceedings" (pp. 56-61). IARIA.]