The Development of Sensitivity to Automatic Behavior

People’s behavior can be roughly categorized into two modes: either reflective and thoughtful, or automatic and rote. Past work on Theory of Mind has focused on the first category. But do children notice when people are acting in an automatic way? This paper examined five- to ten-year-old children’s reasoning about others’ rote behavior, focusing on the consequences of this inference in teaching contexts (N = 660 across four studies, 327 girls). Children’s sensitivity to rote behavior increased with development, with consistent competence emerging around age 7. Rote behavior was also associated with worse teaching. These results indicate when and how reasoning about automatic behavior matters to children’s perception of others, and suggest novel extensions to models of Theory of Mind.