The Influence of Context and Player Comments on Preschoolers’ Social and Partner-Directed Communicative Behavior

ABSTRACT To successfully navigate their social worlds, children must adapt their behaviors to diverse situations and do so in a fluid fashion. The current study explored preschool-aged children’s sensitivity to a gameplay context (cooperative/competitive) and messages from another (fictional) player (team-oriented/self-oriented) while distributing gameplay resources. To understand children’s approach to social behavior within these contexts, we focused on whether these factors affected 1) the number of resources children provided to the other player and 2) children’s verbal responses to other players. Children (4 to 6 years-old, N = 118) first provided verbal responses to audio messages, then completed a resource distribution task. Children’s verbal responses were influenced by both context and the other players’ messages; however, there was a greater influence of players’ messages in a competitive context. In contrast, children’s resource distributions were influenced primarily by the context (greater sharing of resources in the cooperative context). Children with better ToM showed a greater shift in their distributive behavior across conditions, specifically, distributing more items to the other players within a cooperative context relative to a competitive context. Also, within a cooperative context, children with better EF generated more prosocial comments for the other player. Together, the findings highlight the interplay between contextual and interpersonal factors with children’s cognitive skills for prosocial behavior.