The Development of Sensitivity to Automatic Behavior

People’s behavior can be roughly categorized into two modes: reflective and thoughtful, or automatic and rote. Past work on Theory of Mind has focused on how children reason about the first category of behavior. But do children also notice when other people are acting in an automatic way? And if so, when might this matter? This paper examined 5- to 10-year-old children’s reasoning about others’ rote behavior, mainly focusing on the consequences of this inference in teaching contexts (N = 660 across four studies, 327 girls; data collected online from U.S.-based children between May 2022 and December 2024). Children’s sensitivity to apparent rote behavior increased with development, with more consistent inferences 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.