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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Dev. Psychol.

Sec. Cognitive Development

Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdpys.2025.1574528

This article is part of the Research Topic Children's Teaching View all 3 articles

Children's sensitivity to automatic behavior relates to pedagogical reasoning and Theory of Mind

Provisionally accepted
Ilona Bass Ilona Bass 1*Joseph Anthony Colantonio Joseph Anthony Colantonio 1Rosie Aboody Rosie Aboody 1,2Michelle Wong Michelle Wong 1Tomer Ullman Tomer Ullman 1Elizabeth Bonawitz Elizabeth Bonawitz 1
  • 1 Harvard University, Cambridge, United States
  • 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Pedagogy is a powerful way to learn about the world, and young children are adept at both learning from teaching and teaching others themselves. Theoretical accounts of pedagogical reasoning suggest that an important aspect of being an effective teacher is considering what learners need to know, as misconceptions about learners’ beliefs, needs, or goals can result in less helpful teaching. One underexplored way in which teachers may fail to represent what learners know is by simply “going through the motions” of teaching, without actively engaging with the learner’s beliefs, needs, and goals at all. In the current paper, we replicate ongoing work that suggests children are sensitive to when others are relying on automatic scripts in the context of teaching. We then look at the potential link to two related measures. First, we hypothesize that sensitivity to a teacher’s perceived automaticity will be linked to classic measures of pedagogical sensitivity and learning – specifically, how children explore and learn about novel toys following pedagogical versus non-pedagogical demonstrations. Second, we hypothesize that the development of Theory of Mind (and age differences more broadly) relate to these pedagogical sensitivities. Our online adaptation of the novel toy exploration task did not invoke pedagogical reasoning as expected, and so we do not find robust links between these tasks. We do find that Theory of Mind predicts children’s ability to detect automaticity in teaching when controlling for age. This work thus highlights the connections between sensitivity to teaching and reasoning about others’ knowledge, with implications for the factors that support children’s ability to teach others.

    Keywords: automatic behavior, Pedagogical reasoning, Theory of Mind, social cognition, cognitive development, Counterfactual reasoning

    Received: 11 Feb 2025; Accepted: 02 Apr 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Bass, Colantonio, Aboody, Wong, Ullman and Bonawitz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ilona Bass, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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