Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior research has shown that children are highly responsive to adults' attention, benefit from its presence, and suffer in its absence. However, not much is known about the extent to which children track other's attention to third parties, or the extent to which children actively make decisions and plans to engage adults' attention. In Experiment 1, we looked at whether children (mean: 5;11 range: 4;0-7;11) distinguished attentive and distracted adults in a minimal contrast where attention to a third party (a puppet) was all that varied and the adults were otherwise matched on affect, contingent responding, and other cues. Six- and seven-year-olds but not younger children predicted that the puppets would prefer the attentive adults. In Experiment 2, we looked at whether children (mean: 5;11 range: 4;0-7;11) tracked the co-variation between an adult's attentiveness and a puppet's topics of conversation. We found that older, but not younger children chose the puppets' next topic according to what the co-variation data indicated would best engage the adults' attention. These results suggest that by ages six and seven, but not earlier, children track adults' attention even in third-party contexts and can plan interventions to engage adults' attention.