Young children share imagined possibilities: evidence for an early-emerging human competence

Harris, Paul L.

doi:10.1098/rstb.2022.0022

Cited by 13 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 43 publications

(55 reference statements)

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“…Across a range of situations, whether prosaic or unexpected, children are prone to offer physical, biological or psychological explanation for the outcomes they observe. They rarely invoke magical or supernatural forces, contrary to early 20 th century theorizing by Piaget (Harris 2012;2022a).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

From Charitable Inference to Active Credence

Harris

2022

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Young children routinely display a naturalistic understanding of the world. When asked for explanations, they rarely invoke supernatural or religious explanations even when confronted by puzzling or unexpected phenomena. Nevertheless, depending on the surrounding culture, children are eventually prone to accept God as a creator, to believe in the power of prayer and to expect there to be an afterlife. A plausible interpretation of this dual stance is that children adopt two different cognitive routes to understanding: one grounded in empirical observation and in trusted testimony about the observable world. Based on this route, children gradually build up a common-sense understanding of various natural domains, including the physical, the biological and the psychological. The second route is grounded in children’s early emerging ability to engage in shared pretense. As members of a religious community, children will routinely observe community members engage in activities, such as prayer, which cannot be readily understood in terms of their standard, common-sense framework. Nevertheless, children can charitably interpret prayer as special form of communication, directed at an imagined interlocutor. Cumulative exposure to such belief-based activities is likely to encourage children to transition from charitable interpreters of religious activities to participant believers.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

From Charitable Inference to Active Credence

Harris

2022

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“…Harris' [48] framework provides a useful lens for interpreting some of the new empirical data presented in this issue. In one contribution, Wente et al [54] examine the relationship between pretend play and reasoning about possibilities in 3-to 4-year-old children from Peru and the USA.…”

Section: (B) Early and Late Developments In Human Thinking About Poss...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…B 377: 20210333 thinking in behaviour, at least, undergoes a protracted development in humans. A key question for future research will be to uncover whether this gradual development merely reflects improvements in action planning and decision-making, as Cesana-Arlotti et al [47] would have it, or whether it reflects genuine conceptual transformation, as Harris [48] and Grigoroglou & Ganea [57] would have it.…”

Section: (B) Early and Late Developments In Human Thinking About Poss...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Explicit reasoning about possibilities can take various forms, as demonstrated by the protracted development of the human imagination. In this issue, Harris [48] reviews evidence suggesting that, by 2–3 years of age, children can imagine and draw appropriate inferences about possible events and situations. Around this age, children can sustain a pretend play situation with a partner, attending to the actions of the partner within the constraints of a shared alternative version of reality [49]; they can imagine a potential location of a missing object and deduce its location upon receiving relevant information [50,51]; and they can deploy linguistic indicators of uncertainty (such as maybe and might ) in situations where they suspect a state of affairs to be true but lack definitive evidence [52,53].…”

Section: Proximate Questions: Mechanisms and Ontogenymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Harris' [48] framework provides a useful lens for interpreting some of the new empirical data presented in this issue. In one contribution, Wente et al .…”

Section: Proximate Questions: Mechanisms and Ontogenymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny

Redshaw

Ganea

2022

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Humans possess the remarkable capacity to imagine possible worlds and to demarcate possibilities and impossibilities in reasoning. We can think about what might happen in the future and consider what the present would look like had the past turned out differently. We reason about cause and effect, weigh up alternative courses of action and regret our mistakes. In this theme issue, leading experts from across the life sciences provide ground-breaking insights into the proximate questions of how thinking about possibilities works and develops, and the ultimate questions of its adaptive functions and evolutionary history. Together, the contributions delineate neurophysiological, cognitive and social mechanisms involved in mentally simulating possible states of reality; and point to conceptual changes in the understanding of singular and multiple possibilities during human development. The contributions also demonstrate how thinking about possibilities can augment learning, decision-making and judgement, and highlight aspects of the capacity that appear to be shared with non-human animals and aspects that may be uniquely human. Throughout the issue, it becomes clear that many developmental milestones achieved during childhood, and many of the most significant evolutionary and cultural triumphs of the human species, can only be understood with reference to increasingly complex reasoning about possibilities. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny’.

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The other side of false belief: Constructing the objectivity of reality

2023

Infant and Child Development

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Young children appear not to grasp the independence between objective reality and subjective beliefs, as evidenced by their errors on false belief tasks. Whereas decades of research have examined children's developing understanding of the subjectivity of beliefs, however, almost no research has examined the other side of the issue: How do humans come to understand the objectivity of reality, and why is this understanding important? To help address this gap, this article proposes an evolutionary‐developmental account of how the understanding that reality is objective may have emerged in human thinking. Three key steps are highlighted: (i) phylogenetic foundations in great ape competitive mindreading, (ii) ontogenetic foundations in preverbal infant joint attention, and (iii) key experiences of perspectival conflict in linguistic humans. Functionally, the concept of an objective reality facilitated collaborative reasoning and joint decision‐making. To arrive at good joint decisions, individuals needed to recognize that both their own beliefs and others' beliefs could be wrong—with respect to the objective reality.

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Young children share imagined possibilities: evidence for an early-emerging human competence

Cited by 13 publications

References 43 publications

From Charitable Inference to Active Credence

From Charitable Inference to Active Credence

Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny

The other side of false belief: Constructing the objectivity of reality

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