Sequencing of difficulty influences young children’s engagement with spatial challenges

Early gender gaps in the pursuit of challenging cognitive tasks may contribute to later disparities in STEM engagement. Yet little is known about how children’s encounters with difficulty shape their cognitive engagement in real time. We tested whether initial task difficulty affects children’s affective state, decision dynamics, and willingness to pursue challenging spatial tasks in over 170 children aged 6-8 years. By fitting drift-diffusion models to accuracy and response times, we found that starting with hard problems reduced girls’ processing efficiency and response caution on subsequent hard trials, whereas starting with easier problems selectively increased girls’ caution. Boys’ decision dynamics were largely unaffected by trial sequence. In a second experiment, starting with hard problems increased anxiety and reduced confidence for both genders, but only girls showed reduced willingness to choose harder, higher-reward challenges. These findings identify an early mechanism by which difficulty sequencing shapes gender patterns of cognitive engagement.