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Proposed abilities involved in understanding and using information about people and social situations. Competing definitions emphasize social understanding, knowledge, human memory, effective behavior or self-perceived skill; measures of these are not automatically interchangeable indicators of one factor.

Social knowledge is knowledge about people, relationships and social conventions. It can inform a prediction about another person’s behavior without guaranteeing that the prediction is accurate in every setting. A test of an expected response can depend on cultural familiarity as well as the ability to infer a mental state. Separating knowledge of a convention from applying it helps interpret measures of social intelligence. ^[ref]

Forming impressions and interpretations of other people from behavior, appearance and context. Observing a movement is different from establishing its intention, cause or emotional meaning.

A social psychologist studies how social information and interactions influence cognition, emotion and behavior. Controlled experiments can vary a social cue while measuring another person’s response. Negotiation studies, for example, separate the emotion communicated by a partner from the observer’s own feeling and subsequent concession. This makes social influence an empirically testable relation rather than an explanation inferred merely because two people behaved similarly. ^[ref]

Behaviors supporting effective interaction in a specified context. Typical real-world behavior, maximal ability and self-perceived competence are related but distinct measurement targets.

Interpreting socially relevant information such as intentions or implications of behavior. Performance depends on the information available, the scoring criterion and potentially general verbal or human memory abilities.

A structured observational procedure using episodes of caregiver presence, separation and reunion to assess attachment-related behavior. Interpretation concerns the organized pattern of behavior in context rather than assuming that either distress or absence of distress alone establishes security.

Tim Shallice studied selective cognitive deficits and control of behavior after frontal brain lesions. Open-ended tasks with several subgoals test whether a person organizes and reactivates intentions when there is no single external prompt for each step. Such tasks complement short structured tests by making the coordination of actions itself part of the measurement. ^[ref]

Use of a recording to compare a concrete prediction about observable behavior with recorded evidence. Preparation matters: selective flaw-searching can reproduce the original bias rather than provide a fair test of the prediction.

W. H. Thorpe studied how birds acquire song. His experiments on hand-reared chaffinches varied their auditory experience and compared later songs, including exposure to artificial tutoring patterns. The design distinguished what develops without normal song exposure from what is shaped by hearing an appropriate model.^[ref]

The illuminating point is that an orderly adult behavior need not be either wholly learned or wholly independent of experience. Controlled exposure can reveal constraints on learning while also showing that the final pattern depends on the sounds encountered.

William A. Truitt coauthored an experimental identification of spinal neurons important for ejaculation in male rats. With Lique M. Coolen, he used a toxin targeted to a receptor-bearing lumbar neuron population. Removing these cells disrupted ejaculation while sparing other observed sexual behaviors.^[ref]

The design goes beyond observing neurons active during a behavior: altering the population and measuring a selective behavioral loss tests its causal importance. The result supports a role in a spinal coordinating circuit, while leaving the circuit's other necessary components to be identified.

Yerco E. Uribe-Bahamonde contributed computational analyses of habituation using the SOP model. The work investigates whether one model of stimulus processing can reproduce several behavioral characteristics across training conditions. These simulations test consequences of the specified mathematical rules; agreement with behavior does not make the model’s internal states direct recordings of neuronal activity. ^[ref]