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 TopicChildren's TeachingView all 3 articles
Children's sensitivity to automatic behavior relates to pedagogical reasoning and Theory of Mind
Provisionally accepted
- 1Harvard University, Cambridge, United States
- 2Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
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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
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