Little research exists on how children understand the actions of nonhuman agents. Researchers often assume that children overgeneralize and attribute human properties such as false beliefs to nonhuman agents. In this study, three experiments were conducted to test this assumption. The experiments used 24 children in New York (aged 2,11-6,11 years), 52 children in Michigan (aged 3,5-6,11 years), and a second group of 45 children in Michigan (3,4-8,5 years) from Christian backgrounds. In the first two experiments, children participated in false-belief tests in which they were asked about human and various nonhuman agents including animals and God. Experiment 3 consisted of a modified perspective-taking task, also including nonhuman agents. The results of the study suggest that children do not consistently use human agent concepts but instead can use different agent concepts for some nonhuman agents like God and special animals. Children are not bound to anthropomorphize, but they often do.

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Preschool-aged children are exposed to fantasy stories with the expectation that they will learn messages in those stories that are applied to real-world situations. We examined children's transfer from fantastical and real stories. Over the course of 2 studies, 3½-to 5½-year-old children were less likely to transfer problem solutions from stories about fantasy characters than stories about real people. A combined analysis of the participants in the 2 studies revealed that the factors predicting transfer differed for the fantasy and real stories. These findings are discussed within the context of their implications for preschoolers' developing boundaries between fantasy and real worlds.

This study examined the relationship between viewing an infant DVD and expressive and receptive language outcomes. Children between 12 and 15 months were randomly assigned to view Baby Wordsworth, a DVD highlighting words around the house marketed for children beginning at 12 months of age. Viewings took place in home settings over 6 weeks. After every 2 weeks and five exposures to the DVD, children were assessed on expressive and receptive communication measures. Results indicated there was no increased growth on either outcome for children who had viewed the DVD as compared to children in the control group, even after multiple exposures. After controlling for age, gender, cognitive developmental level, income, and parent education, the most significant predictor of vocabulary comprehension and production scores was the amount of time children were read to.

Television has become a nearly ubiquitous feature in children's cultural landscape. A review of the research into young children's learning from television indicates that the likelihood that children will learn from screen media is influenced by their developing social relationships with on-screen characters, as much as by their developing perception of the screen and their symbolic understanding and comprehension of information presented on screen. Considering the circumstances in which children under 6 years learn from screen media can inform teachers, parents, and researchers about the important nature of social interaction in early learning and development. The findings reviewed in this article suggest the social nature of learning, even learning from screen media.

Historically, the development of God concepts in human cognition has been explained anthropomorphically. In other words, for children especially, God is a big, superhuman who lives in the sky. Recent empirical research on the development of these concepts may suggest an alternative hypothesis. In this paper, we review this research and outline the "preparedness hypothesis," which suggests that children may be cognitively equipped to understand some properties of God in a non-anthropomorphic way.

The current study examined the cultural factors (i.e., religious background, religious participation, parents' views of prayer, and parents' concepts of God) that contribute to children's differentiation between the capabilities of human minds and God's mind. Protestant Christian, Roman Catholic, Muslim, and Religiously Non‐Affiliated parents and their preschool‐aged children were interviewed (N = 272). Children of Muslim parents differentiated the most between God's mind and human minds (i.e., human minds are fallible but God's is not), and children who had greater differentiation between God's and humans' minds had parents who had the least anthropomorphic conceptions of God. Additionally, there was a unique effect of being raised in a Religiously Non‐Affiliated home on the degree of children's differentiation between God's and human minds after religious context factors had been accounted for; in other words, children of Religious Non‐Affiliates differentiated between humans and God the least and their differentiation was unrelated to religious context factors. These findings delineate the ways in which religious context differences influence concepts of God from the earliest formation. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Children's concept of God develops during the preschool years. The degree of anthropomorphism in children's concept of God varies. What does this study add? Muslim children have a strong differentiation between what God's mind and human minds can do. Religiously Non‐Affiliated children have almost no differentiation between God's and human minds. Parent anthropomorphism explains variance in children's God concepts, both within and across religious groups.

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