| Center For Social Cognition |
The Place for Developing Your Child’s Social and Cognitive Potential!
The Center for Social Cognition is here to help you with your child’s cognitive (thinking) and social needs. We understand your needs and will enable your child to socially integrate in the school and community. Social cognition has to do with how well your child works with his or her interactions with others. Children with autism are said to lack a “theory of mind” when it comes to befriending and interacting with others. They are often viewed as concrete thinker, impulsive, socially inappropriate, disorganized, inattentive, inflexible, and as lacking the ability to pursue long-term goals.
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| Cognition: A Social Set of Circumstances |
The CSC focuses on developing the “executive functions” processes of your child. This refers to emphasizing your child’s abilities to develop self-control over his or her actions. Your child will learn how to understand personal strengths and needs, set goals and plan out methods for achieving them, and how to use these goals and plans to behave and act on them in everyday life.
Executive functions (EF) are what the mind does to enable us to plan, carry out plans, act on our plans, evaluate our actions, and make changes when necessary to reach our objectives. They include memory, ability to control impulses, ability to evaluate one’s actions and change course, ability to plan ahead, and the ability to switch gears when one is unable to reach the goals. They are important for academic, work, social success for your child.
Using executive functions as the platform for intervention will ensure your child to succeed at difficult and non-routine tasks. These will include areas where your child will:
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| Executive Functions Defined |
- Working Memory: The ability to keep information in mind while working on complex tasks.
- Inhibitory Control: The capacity to repress certain thoughts or actions that keep us from reaching our goals.
- Planning: The ability to make and stick to a mental roadmap that helps us to reach our goals.
- Organization: The capacity to use a system to arrange either tangible things or thoughts.
- Time management: The ability to keep track of time, allocate time limits to certain tasks, to stay within time constraints and meet deadlines.
- Metacognition: The ability to step back and view ourselves objectively, evaluation how we are progressing toward solving problems.
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- Self-regulation of affect: The capacity to manage emotions to control behavior and achieve goals.
- Task initiation: The ability to begin a task early enough to complete it by a deadline.
- Flexibility: The ability to adapt to new situations by revising plans when we encounter obstacles, setbacks, new information, or mistakes.
- Goal-directed persistence: The capacity to stay on task until a goal is reached without going off course due to distractions.
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We will use the intentional therapy approach, to help your child develop a more complete awareness of his or her interactive social strengths and weaknesses.Your child will also learn to utilize language within the framework of his or her executive functions. Social understanding is acquired largely through communication, and participation in your child’s “mental world” requires it. Through language, your child will become part of “the community of minds” of others. Your child will learn about how minds, emotions and desires work, both for him or herself and for others.
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