Children’s Understanding of Ordinary and Extraordinary Minds

How and when do children develop an understanding of extraordinary mental capacities? Fifty-six preschoolers (3-5 years old) were tested on false-belief and knowledge-ignorance tasks about the mental states of carefully contrasted agents – some agents were ordinary humans, some had exceptional perceptual capacities, and others possessed extraordinary mental capacities. Results indicated that, in contrast with 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.