Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Perseverance, above and beyond IQ, predicts academic outcomes in school age children, however, little is knownabout what factors affect persistence in early childhood. Here, we propose a formal Bayesian model of how children mightlearn how to calibrate effort from observing adult models and then explore this idea behaviorally across two experiments inchildren and infants. Results from Experiment 1 show that preschoolers persist more after watching an adult persist, but onlyif the adult is successful at reaching their goal. Experiment 2 and a pre-registered replication extend these findings, showingthat even infants use adult models to modulate their persistence, and can generalize this inference to novel situations. Theseresults suggest that both preschoolers and infants are sensitive to adult persistence and use it to calibrate their own effort infar-reaching ways.