The Development of Selective Attention in Children's Emotion Reasoning

We investigated developmental differences in the attention strategies children use in their emotion reasoning across middle childhood. Specifically, we examined whether, with age, children become less likely to distribute their attention broadly when reasoning about emotions, and more likely to come to attend selectively to the most reliable cues. To test this hypothesis, N = 180 five- through ten-year-old children learned to classify an alien's emotional displays into two categories. Categories could be learned via two different strategies: distributing attention across all possible emotion-related cues or selectively attending to the most predictive cue. Consistent with our hypothesis, Bayesian zero-one inflated beta regression revealed that from five through approximately eight years old, with age, participants were increasingly likely to use a selective attention strategy. Selective attention use increased by an average of 5 percentage points per year across this age range (95% CI [2%pt, 7%pt]). This result was also characterized by decreasing strategic variability across development. For every year older a participant was, they were also 1.77 times more likely to use a single consistent attention strategy, rather than a hybrid of distributed and selective attention (95% CI [1.43, 2.22]). These results reflect a potential trade-off across development between flexibility and efficiency in emotion reasoning. SUMMARY: There are many different cues we can use to reason about others' emotions; the ways we attend to such cues may vary across development We investigated children's attention strategy use during emotion reasoning in the context of a novel emotion category learning paradigm From ages five through eight, with age, children were increasingly likely to attend selectively to the most reliable emotion cue, rather than distribute their attention This shift may give rise to a changing trade off across middle childhood between flexibility and efficiency in emotion reasoning.