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Pedagogy is a powerful way to learn about the world, and young children are adept at both learning from teaching and teaching others themselves. Theoretical accounts of pedagogical reasoning suggest that an important aspect of being an effective teacher is considering what learners need to know, as misconceptions about learners' beliefs, needs, or goals can result in less helpful teaching. One underexplored way in which teachers may fail to represent what learners know is by simply “going through the motions” of teaching, without actively engaging with the learner's beliefs, needs, and goals at all. In the current paper, we replicate ongoing work that suggests children are sensitive to when others are relying on automatic scripts in the context of teaching. We then look at the potential link to two related measures. First, we hypothesize that sensitivity to a teacher's perceived automaticity will be linked to classic measures of pedagogical sensitivity and learning—specifically, how children explore and learn about novel toys following pedagogical vs. non-pedagogical demonstrations. Second, we hypothesize that the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) (and age differences more broadly) relate to these pedagogical sensitivities. Our online adaptation of the novel toy exploration task did not invoke pedagogical reasoning as expected, and so we do not find robust links between these tasks. We do find that ToM predicts children's ability to detect automaticity in teaching when controlling for age. This work thus highlights the connections between sensitivity to teaching and reasoning about others' knowledge, with implications for the factors that support children's ability to teach others. 

Abstract Humans often communicate using body movements like winks, waves, and nods. However, it is unclear how we identify when someone’s physical actions are communicative. Given people’s propensity to interpret each other’s behavior as aimed to produce changes in the world, we hypothesize that people expect communicative actions to efficiently reveal that they lack an external goal. Using computational models of goal inference, we predict that movements that are unlikely to be produced when acting towards the world and, in particular, repetitive ought to be seen as communicative. We find support for our account across a variety of paradigms, including graded acceptability tasks, forced-choice tasks, indirect prompts, and open-ended explanation tasks, in both market-integrated and non-market-integrated communities. Our work shows that the recognition of communicative action is grounded in an inferential process that stems from fundamental computations shared across different forms of action interpretation.