Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do children understand that people vary in how attentive they are and recognize that people prefer attentive social partners? Across six experiments, we showed participants one agent engaging attentively with a child puppet and another who was distracted throughout the interaction. Across four experiments, four and five-year-olds (total N= 132; overall mean: 4.85; range: 4.0-5.9 years) failed to distinguish the agents. Six and seven-year-olds (total N=131; overall mean: 7.01; range: 6.0-7.9 years) succeeded given repeated interactions but not robustly: fewer than half the children consistently chose the attentive agent. By contrast, adults succeeded given a single demonstration. Children's difficulty was not due to task demands; four and five-year-olds readily distinguished agents who did and did not satisfy the puppet's desires. Thus, although children understand attention as a discrete mental state very early in development, and react negatively when adults are not responsive, children may be relatively insensitive to cues to attention as a continuous mental state.