Prior research has shown that children are highly responsive to adults' attention, benefit from its presence and suffer in its absence. Undivided attention is socially favorable and crucial for learning. However, not much is known about the extent to which children make decisions and plans to engage adult attention. In Experiment 1, we looked at whether children (mean: 5;11 range: 4;0-7;11) could distinguish attentive and distracted adults in a minimal contrast where attention was all that varied and they were otherwise matched on affect, contingent responding and other cues. Six and seven-year-olds but not younger children preferred the attentive adults. In Experiment 2, we looked at whether children (mean: 5;11 range: 4;0-7;11) tracked the co-variation between adults’ attentiveness and the content of the interaction and found again that older, but not younger, children used the covariation information to plan interventions to engage the adult’s attention. These results suggest that young children may respond to adult’s attention but not successfully track it across either agents or contexts; by contrast, six and seven-year-olds value attention and make decisions and plan interventions to engage it.

Authors:

Shengyi Wu: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Laura Schulz: Massachusetts Institute of Technology