Basic capacity for social contingency detection continues to develop across adolescence

The main focus on individual social cognition in adolescence has prevented the study of the fundamental capacity to detect and respond to social cues, as this requires capturing interaction dynamics within dyads. To improve our understanding of basic social capacity development across adolescence, we used the Perceptual Crossing Experiment (PCE), to assess real-time social interaction in pairs of 208 adolescents. In comparing early, mid, and late adolescence, we found an overall higher performance of late adolescents on behavioural and cognitive measures of basic social capacity, while the reported awareness of implicitly established social interaction was overall lower in this group. In addition, late adolescents demonstrated faster improvement of behaviour throughout the experiment, compared with the other groups. Our results indicate that basic social capacity continues to develop throughout adolescence, which is expressed by faster social coordination on a behavioural level. This finding underscores dynamic social interaction within dyads as a new opportunity for identifying altered social development during adolescence.