Journal
CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Volume 81, Issue 5, Pages 1475-1489Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01486.x
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Funding
- NICHD NIH HHS [HD 22149, R37 HD022149-19, R37 HD022149] Funding Source: Medline
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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.
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