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{
    "pk": 49263,
    "title": "Not seeing it: What young children don't understand about attention",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "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.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Psychology; Cognitive development; Development; Social cognition"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers with Oral Presentation",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5zf6k9p7",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Shengyi",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Wu",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Massachusetts Institute of Technology",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Laura",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Schulz",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Massachusetts Institute of Technology",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2025-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49263/galley/37224/download/"
        }
    ]
}