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Looking away from an interlocutor's face during demanding cognitive activity can help adults answer challenging arithmetic and verbal‐reasoning questions (Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998). However, such ‘gaze aversion’ (GA) is poorly applied by 5‐year‐old school children (Doherty‐Sneddon, Bruce, Bonner, Longbotham, & Doyle, 2002). In Experiment 1 we trained ten 5‐year‐old children to use GA while thinking about answers to questions. This trained group performed significantly better on challenging questions compared with 10 controls given no GA training. In Experiment 2 we found significant and monotonic age‐related increments in spontaneous use of GA across three cohorts of ten 5‐year‐old school children (mean ages: 5;02, 5;06 and 5;08). Teaching and encouraging GA during challenging cognitive activity promises to be invaluable in promoting learning, particularly during early primary years.

When asked questions, children often avert their gaze. Furthermore the frequency of such gaze aversion (GA) is related to the difficulty of cognitive processing (Doherty-Sneddon, Bruce, Bonner, Longbotham & Doyle 2002), suggesting that GA is a good indicator of children's thinking and comprehension. However, little is known about how teachers detect and interpret such gaze signals. In Study 1 teaching interactions were analysed to determine teachers' responses to different patterns of children's eye gaze. In Study 2 a different group of teachers completed a questionnaire assessing teachers' awareness of GA in determining children's thinking, understanding and interest. Results showed that teachers did not typically respond to children's GA in predicted ways and did not associate GA with children's thinking. However when asked explicitly about GA cues they made predictions relating to question difficulty and children's thinking in line with empirical work (DohertySneddon et al., 2002). We conclude that whilst teachers have an implicit understanding of GA cues, they typically do not make full use of such cues during classroom teaching.3 During difficult cognitive activity (e.g., remembering information, thinking of an answer to a question, speech-planning, speaking) we often close our eyes, look up at the sky, or look away from the person we are

Looking away from an interlocutor's face during demanding cognitive activity can help adults and children answer challenging mental‐arithmetic and verbal‐reasoning questions (Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998; Phelps, Doherty‐Sneddon, & Warnock, 2006). Whilst such ‘gaze aversion’ (GA) is used far less by 5‐year‐old schoolchildren, its use increases dramatically during the first years of primary education, reaching adult levels by 8 years of age (Doherty‐Sneddon, Bruce, Bonner, Longbotham, & Doyle, 2002). The current study investigates whether developmental changes also occur in a qualitative aspect of GA – the direction of movement involved in GA shifts. Video data from eighteen 5‐year‐olds and nineteen 8‐year‐olds answering verbal and arithmetic questions were analysed for direction of GA. We found very different profiles of direction of GA across the two ages: whilst the 5‐year‐olds used predominantly rapid multidirectional ‘flicking’ movements and some sustained left lateral movements, the 8‐year‐olds used predominantly sustained rightward movements. It is concluded that there are concomitant qualitative changes in the nature of GA shifts as well as quantitative increases in the use of GA across these age groups. A model of human attention in face‐to‐face interaction is discussed, as are implications for the assessment of children's learning and development.