Children's understanding of ordinary and extraordinary minds

Abstract

How and when do children develop an understanding of extraordinary mental capacities? The current study tested 56 preschoolers on false-belief and knowledge-ignorance tasks about the mental states of contrasting agents--some agents were ordinary humans, some had exceptional perceptual capacities, and others possessed extraordinary mental capacities. Results indicated that, in contrast to younger and older peers, children within a specific age range reliably attributed fallible, human-like capacities to ordinary humans and to several special agents (including God) for both tasks. These data lend critical support to an anthropomorphism hypothesis--which holds that children's understanding of extraordinary minds is derived from their everyday intuitive psychology--and reconcile disparities between the findings of other studies on children's understanding of extraordinary minds.