ArticleScientific reports2024
The COVID-19 pandemic and social cognitive outcomes in early childhood.
Article in Scientific reports, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Universal digital mental health interventions for children and youth: a scoping review.Frontiers in digital health · 2025Pooled it
- Pandemic Babies: Developmental Outcomes in Preschool-Aged Children Born During the COVID-19 Era.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Time trends and area-level socioeconomic inequalities in early childhood development at 2-2.5 years old in England between 2019 and 2025: a local area ecological study.BMJ public health · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns led to sweeping changes in the everyday lives of children and families, including school closures, remote work and learning, and social distancing. To date no study has examined whether these profound changes in young children's day to day social interactions impacted the development of social cognition skills in early childhood. To address this question, we compared the performance of two cohorts of 3.5- to 5.5-year-old children tested before and after the COVID-19 lockdowns on several measures of false-belief understanding, a critical social cognition skill that undergoes important developments in this age range. Controlling for age and language skills, children tested after the pandemic demonstrated significantly worse false-belief understanding than those tested before the pandemic, and this difference was larger for children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. These results suggest that the pandemic negatively impacted the development of social cognition skills in early childhood, especially for lower SES children.
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Registered trials
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