Posdoctoral researcher: María Emilia Oñate

Scholarship Directors: Belén Mesurado and Ignacio Silva

Project Duration: 2020-2022

Funding: posdoctoral co-financed CONICET scholarship

The purpose of this work is to know if children between 4 and 6 years old can differentiate between different types of human and non-human agents (animal and divine) and if this distinction changes as they grow up. For this purpose, a longitudinal study will be carried out in two groups of children, cognitive development, theory of mind, and three tests will be carried out to assess the attribution of prior knowledge to the agents. It will be examined whether children attribute different prior knowledge capacity to human (mother or caretaker) and non-human (dog and God) agents. In addition, it will be specified if the attribution of prior knowledge capacity to different agents (human and non-human) changes as they grow in two groups of children from 4 to 5 years old and from 5 to 6 years old. Then the change in the theory of mind ability will be studied in two groups of children from 4 to 5 years old and from 5 to 6 years old. Finally, it will be analyzed if the capacity of theory of mind reached by the child affects the changes in the levels of attribution of previous knowledge to different agents (human and non-human) as they grow.