Children's understanding of ordinary and extraordinary minds

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 humands 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.Citation: Lane, J. D., Wellman, H. M. & Evans, E. M. (2010). 'Children's understanding of ordinary and extraordinary minds', Child Development, 81(5), 1475-1489. [The definitive version of the article is available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01486.x/abstract]. © 2010 Lane, J. D., Wellman, H. M. & Evans, E. M. The full-text of this article is not available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page