Preschoolers and Infants Calibrate Persistence from Adult Models

Perseverance, above and beyond IQ, predicts academicoutcomes in school age children, however, little is knownabout what factors affect persistence in early childhood. Here,we propose a formal Bayesian model of how children mightlearn how to calibrate effort from observing adult models andthen explore this idea behaviorally across two experiments inchildren and infants. Results from Experiment 1 show thatpreschoolers persist more after watching an adult persist, butonly if the adult is successful at reaching their goal.Experiment 2 and a pre-registered replication extend thesefindings, showing that even infants use adult models tomodulate their persistence, and can generalize this inferenceto novel situations. These results suggest that bothpreschoolers and infants are sensitive to adult persistence anduse it to calibrate their own effort in far-reaching ways.