In the behavioral/social context:
In an average social/classroom situation, social cues and signals are whizzing by fast and furious. Remarkably, most children are able to catch, process, and respond to them accurately. For a child with slow processing speed, by the time they have caught, processed, and responded to the beginning of the social interaction, three or four (or more) additional signals may have gone by. Or, just as often, by the time they have caught the fact that a social interaction of significance is beginning, they are only able to catch, process, and respond to a cue many steps into the interaction, without knowing what the beginning was, which makes it, naturally, rather challenging to determine the appropriate response at that point. This is overwhelming and discouraging, which is why such children often give up, get frustrated, or respond in an odd or disproportionate way to what appears to us to be ordinary social situations. Social interactions are a form of mixed verbal and nonverbal conversation, for which slow processors are able to absorb only bits and pieces.
Just as with academic situations, if we give them additional time and space (often in a quiet one-to-one setting) to process social situations a little bit at a time, they often demonstrate much better social comprehension than it might at first appear. They also benefit from explicit instruction in many of the skills that NT children absorb unconsciously from their environments, because the flood of interactions going by is too quick and confused for them to make the cause-and-effect connections that teach those skills in NT children. The better the knowledge and skill base in social-emotional functioning that we can give them through instruction at their processing pace, the more able they will be to infer the patterns of social situations (and the adaptive responses to them) from the bits and pieces that they are able to glean at full speed.
If you think about social reasoning and cause-and-effect thinking as A + B + C = D (simplistic, yes), and slow processing speed as causing children to miss one of ABCD, then you can see how they have difficulty learning social calculus. Especially if one misses a different letter or more every time, so that sometimes one sees A + B = D, or A + C = D, or B = D, or A + B + C = ?
