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