Previous research shows that the presence of another person, specifically an angry eye gaze, affects children’s performance on various tasks as it increases arousal. Therefore, we are researching whether a picture of angry eyes, compared to a picture of flowers, affects a child’s performance on executive functioning tasks. We let children play two computer games, one involving matching shapes and colors and the other involving judging the direction of a fish. We then measure their reaction time and number of correct answers for each task. So far we have found that children’s performance is worse when they are shown the picture of the eyes rather than when shown the picture of the flowers, which supports previous research. This study takes about 30 minutes.

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