Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to reason about our own and others’ competenceinforms our everyday decisions. However, competence is anabstract concept which manifests in the objective properties ofthe task completed by an agent (i.e., task-based features, suchas quality of outcome or task difficulty) as well as the sub-jective properties of the agent (i.e., agent-based features, suchas dexterity, speed, focus). Thus, acquiring an integrated no-tion of competence may be a nontrivial challenge for youngchildren. Prior work on children’s understanding of compe-tence has often used explicit verbal cues to describe the rele-vant features, or experimental tasks that confounded these fea-tures. Here we examine how preschool-aged children evalu-ate the relative competence of two agents by systematicallymanipulating task-based and agent-based features without ex-plicit linguistic or gestural support. We find that 4- and 5-year-olds readily use perceptual cues to task-based (i.e., taskdifficulty) and agent-based (i.e., agent speed) features to in-fer competence (Exp.1-3) but not when when these perceptualcues are closely matched (Exp.4). These results suggest thata basic understanding of relative competence emerges earlierthan previously believed, but an abstract, adult-like concept ofcompetence may continue to develop throughout childhood.