Finding the odd one out: trivial need-of-help is a salient social stimulus for children

Abstract

This study explored the prioritization of socially relevant information by investigating children’s processing of need-of-help versus basic categorical contentusing perceptually highly similar visual stimuli.Children (N = 47, 25 girls, M(age) = 8.06 yrs.) were asked to select the onepicture out of four thatwas different from the others.Two tasks, each including two conditions, were implemented in random order: human-bird andneed-of-helpdistinction(n = 80, 20 trials per condition). Accuracy was higher for bird, 84%, 95% CI [.78, .81], compared to child targets, 73%, [.64, .69], and for need-of-help, 84%, [.74, .79], compared to no need-of-help targets, 64%, [.58, .69].Response times were fastest for child, Mdn = 3669 ms, [3520, 3903] followed by bird targets, Mdn = 4281 ms, [4104, 4458], and slowest for the two need-of-help conditions, Mdn = 6188 ms, [5901, 6540], and Mdn = 6500 ms, [6147, 6984].These results suggest that need-of-help situations are more salient social stimuli compared to no-need-of-help stimuli. Need-of-help and human-bird categorizations were overall similarly accurate, but response times indicated that distinction of need-of-help content is more demanding than human-bird categorization. Accuracy and response times therefore likely reflect different processing requirements