Attentional Advantage in Gifted Children Is Selective to High-Demand Exploitative Tasks: Evidence from TEPR

The cognitive advantages of gifted children have long attracted attention, yet most evidence has been derived from behavioral outcomes such as accuracy and reaction time, offering limited insight into the underlying cognitive processes. This study adopted a process-oriented approach to examine whether and how gifted children differ from their non-gifted peers in terms of attentional resource allocation in exploitative versus exploratory tasks with different levels of difficulty. Fifty gifted (138.22±6.23 months) and fifty-one non-gifted (107.94±5.26 months) primary school children were recruited and completed an exploitative task and an exploratory task with low, medium, and high difficulties. Accuracy and reaction time were measured as behavioral level outcomes. Task-evoked pupil response (TEPR) was measured using eye-tracking and served as the physiological index of attentional allocation. Results showed that gifted children consistently outperformed non-gifted peers in accuracy across both tasks and all difficulty levels, with group differences increasing as task difficulty rose. The advantage of gifted children in reaction time was evident only at low difficulty level in both tasks. For TEPR, gifted children showed greater attentional resource allocation only in high-difficulty exploitative tasks, with no group differences in exploratory tasks. Taken together, these findings highlight both the stable behavioral-level advantages and the physiological-level selective resource investment strategies of gifted children under a variety of cognitive demands.