Attentional basis of deontic reasoning about permission rules in 3-5 year-old children

Deontic reasoning is a domain of reasoning concerning permissions, obligations,
and prohibitions often utilizing conditional logic (Wason, 1968). Correct identification of
rule violations is bolstered by the addition of a social valence to the rule for both adults
(Tooby & Cosmides, 1992) and children (Harris & Nunez, 1996). This “deontic
advantage” for violation-detection is taken as evidence for evolved social-cognitive
mechanisms for reasoning about cheaters in the context of social contracts (Fiddick,
2004), and the early development of this advantage supports an evolutionary account of
such abilities (Cummins, 2013). The current research hypothesized that differential
attention to rule elements underlies the early emergence of the deontic advantage.
Accuracy to a change-detection paradigm was used to assess implicit attention to
various rule elements after children were told 4 different rules (2 social contracts, 2
epistemic statements). Thirteen 3-year-olds, twenty 4-year-olds, and sixteen 5-year-olds completed the experiment. Each participant completed 64 change-detection trials embedded within a scene depicting adherence to or violation of the rule. Results indicate that 4 and 5 year-olds consistently attend to the most relevant rule information for making decisions regarding violation (F(6, 124)=3.86, p<.01, ηp 2 = .144) and that they use observed compliance/non-compliance with the rule to further direct attention (F(6, 138)=3.27, p<.01, ηp 2 = .125). Furthermore, accuracy of change-detection to scenes of rule violation increases from ages 4 to 5, but not 3 to 4. However, a novel finding emerged suggesting that children use the absence of benefit to direct attention, suggesting possible “being-cheated” detection, rather than cheater-detection (F(9, 345) = 21.855, p<.001, ηp 2 = .322). This work is the first to investigate a deontic effect on attentional processes and opens a new avenue of inquiry to understanding the internal and external variables contributing to the development of deontic reasoning. Follow up studies are currently underway to clarify how children use these environmental cues and in/out group membership to direct attention to rule violations.