# Peer Action Coordination in Middle Childhood: A Replication Null Finding on Emotion Understanding and Inhibitory Control

## TL;DR

This study found that emotion understanding and inhibitory control do not directly help children coordinate actions with peers, but older boys showed better cooperation than younger boys.

## Contribution

The study replicates a previous finding with a null result and reveals a gender and age interaction in peer coordination.

## Key findings

- Emotion understanding and inhibitory control did not correlate with peer action coordination after controlling for age, gender, and motor skills.
- Older boys outperformed younger boys in cooperative action coordination, while girls' performance was stable across age.
- The results suggest peer coordination may depend on gender-specific strategies rather than socio-cognitive abilities alone.

## Abstract

Peer action coordination in middle childhood is thought to benefit from socio-cognitive abilities such as emotion understanding and inhibitory control, but empirical evidence for their role is limited. This study replicates and extends a previous study by examining whether emotion understanding and inhibitory control correlate with children’s peer action coordination in a cooperative sensorimotor problem-solving task. To test this hypothesis, 6- to 10-year-old children (N = 108, M = 8 years, 8 months, 46.3% girls, 53.7% boys) completed the Test of Emotion Comprehension and the Attention Network Task. To assess children’s performance in coordinating their actions with a peer, they were asked to complete the Labyrinth Ball Game—a sensorimotor task that they first performed individually and then together with a peer. Contrary to expectations, there was no direct association between emotion understanding or inhibitory control and children’s peer action coordination after controlling for age, gender, and individual sensorimotor skills. However, a significant interaction between age and gender revealed that older boys showed greater cooperative action coordination performance than younger boys, whereas girls’ performance remained stable across age. These findings challenge the view that individual socio-cognitive abilities straightforwardly support cooperative success, suggesting that peer action coordination in middle childhood may rely on more complex mechanisms, such as gender-specific communicative strategies or social play, rather than on emotion understanding and inhibitory control.