title: Sociocultural input facilitates children's developing understanding of extraordinary minds.
abstract: Three- to 5-year-old (N = 61) religiously schooled preschoolers received theory-of-mind (ToM) tasks about the mental states of ordinary humans and agents with exceptional perceptual or mental capacities. Consistent with an anthropomorphism hypothesis, children beginning to appreciate limitations of human minds (e.g., ignorance) attributed those limits to God. Only 5-year-olds differentiated between humans' fallible minds and God's less fallible mind. Unlike secularly schooled children, religiously schooled 4-year-olds did appreciate another agent's less fallible mental abilities when instructed and reminded about those abilities. Among children who understood ordinary humans' mental fallibilities, knowledge of God predicted attributions of correct epistemic states to extraordinary agents. Results suggest that, at a certain point in ToM development, sociocultural input can facilitate an appreciation for extraordinary minds.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. jonlane@umich.edu
authors.forename: Jonathan D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Lane
authors.forename: Henry M
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Wellman
authors.forename: E Margaret
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Evans
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D019359:Knowledge; D008297:Male; D012067:Religion; D056345:Theory of Mind