Abstract
<p>Children depend on attentive caregivers and track others’ attention starting in infancy. Strikingly however, four- and five-year-olds, unlike older children, do not expect other people to prefer attentive to distracted social partners (Exps 1-3), and do not selectively identify interventions likely to engage a social partner’s attention (Exp 4). By contrast, four- and five-year-olds have no difficulty recognizing that people will prefer social partners who fulfill (versus override) their desires (Exp 5); no difficulty using differences in others’ visual attention to infer what they do and do not know (Exp 6), and no difficulty using differences in others’ visual attention to distinguish attentive and distracted social partners (Exp 7). These results suggest that young children’s failure to understand the social value of attention is not due to task demands or a failure to track and understand visual attention. Rather, the results suggest a dissociation between young children’s sensitivity to others’ visual attention and their tendency to treat others’ attentiveness as relevant to social evaluation. This opens up new questions about a possible shift in children’s understanding of attention from representing it primarily as a perceptual phenomenon to understanding attention as a means of focusing limited cognitive resources.</p>