Children’s Understanding of Ordinary and Extraordinary Minds

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 younge...

Sociocultural input facilitates children's developing understanding of extraordinary minds.

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 bet...

Developing concepts of ordinary and extraordinary communication.

We examine how understandings of ordinary and extraordinary communication develop. Three- to 10-year-old children and adults (N = 183) were given scenarios in which a protagonist wanted help from a human (their parent) or from God. Scenarios varied in whether protagonists expressed their desires aloud (by asking) or silently (by hoping), whether (for human scenarios) parents were nearby or far ...

New Ideas: Ordinary is Extraordinary

With the initial issue of this journal, a new challenge has been offered to the world of sports nutrition: initiate "team oriented" research and clinical trials in order to make dynamic progress in terms of understanding and applying nutrition principals to the field of competitive sports. It is our further challenge that these teams think "outside the box" in terms of their approach to elucida...

Happiness from Ordinary and Extraordinary Experiences