{"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/"}]}