Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate children’s ability to use social display rules toinfer agents’ otherwise under-determined desires. InExperiment 1, seven-to-ten-year-olds saw a protagonistexpress one emotional reaction to an event in front of hersocial partner (the Social Context), and a different expressionbehind her social partner’s back (the Nonsocial Context).Children were able to use the expression in the Social Contextto infer the social partner’s desire and the expression in theNonsocial Context to infer the protagonist’s desire. Thisability increased between ages seven and ten (Experiment 1).When task demands were reduced (Experiment 2), seven-to-eight-year-olds, but not five-to-six-year-olds, succeeded.These results suggest that although it is not easy for observersto infer emotions masked by social display rules, changingemotional expressions between social and non-social contextsallow even children to recover not only the desire of theperson displaying the emotions, but also that of the audience.