Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Young children are frequently exposed to mixed messages about the value of their effort: Educators talk about the importance of effort, but give rewards (e.g., grades) based on children’s achievement. How do these mixed messages about effort influence children’s motivation? Here, we presented 4- to 5-year-old children (N = 80) with an initial verbal message preaching about the importance of effort and generated mixed messages by rewarding participants either by their effort or performance across a series of visual search tasks. We found that children persisted longer on the immediate task, as well as on a novel, transfer task, when they received consistent versus mixed messages about effort. These findings suggest that congruent verbal- and reward-based messages about the value of effort foster children’s persistence.