Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Adults often hold different goals for children's achievement: Sometimes adults want children to learn as much as possible, while at other times adults discount children's learning in favor of high performance. How do children reason about the achievement goals adults have for them? Across 3 preregistered studies (n = 120), we asked whether 5- and 6-year-old children understand the causal relationship between adults' achievement goals, their task choices, and children's competence. In Experiment 1, we found adults are more likely to give harder tasks to children when they hold learning versus performance goals and when the child is more competent. In Experiment 2, we found that children make similar inferences about adults' task selections given the adult's achievement goal and the receiving child's competence. Finally, in Experiment 3, children inferred that adults would pick harder tasks for them when they possessed a learning goal versus a performance goal, which matched their own task choice given the same achievement goals. Thus, young children can infer the relationship between adults' child-directed achievement goals and actions and may use this information to learn about what adults prioritize for children across contexts.