Beliefs about the development of mental life

Caregiving relationships with infants and children are among the most common and most complex human social interactions. Adults' perceptions of children's mental capacities have important consequences for the well-being of children in their care—particularly in the first few years of life, when children's communication skills are limited and caregivers must infer children's rapidly developing thoughts, feelings, and needs. In a series of studies, we assessed how US adults conceptualize the development of the human mind over the first five years of life. Exploratory factor analysis identified four core capacities that anchored participants' representations of the developing human mind: bodily sensation (e.g., hunger, pain), negative affect (e.g., distress, frustration), social connection (e.g., love, learning from others), and cognition and control (e.g., planning, self-control). Participants believed that these capacities were present to different degrees at birth, followed different developmental trajectories, and were driven by different developmental mechanisms, such as biological "preprogramming," physical maturation, passive observation, and social learning. The current studies shed light on this fascinating and understudied aspect of "mind perception" among US adults, in turn highlighting possibilities for theory-based interventions to encourage developmentally appropriate parenting behaviors.