Preschoolers understand that a frog can move by

Preschoolers understand that a frog can move by itself but a car takes effort.
Growth: Animals get bigger and more complex, objects do not.
Internal Parts: Insides of animate and inanimate objects are different. Blood and bones
rather than cotton and metal.
Inheritance: Only living things have offspring resembling their parents. Asking why a dog
was pink, thought parents might be pink. Why a phone is pink, someone painted it pink.
Knew that a baby pig raised by a cow would still grow up to be a pig.
Illness: Colour blindness and allergies more likely to be inherited by parents, but a sore
throat from other people or contaminated food

Healing: Animate things can recover and regrow, toys need to be fixed. Know the
difference between a human haircut and a doll haircut.
Teleological Explanations and Essentialism: Kids believe that all living things exist for a purpose
(fish are smooth so they don’t cut other things), this is teleological . Based on knowledge that
tools and machines are built with a purpose. Kids also believe that living things are rooted in
essentialism , that is, all birds share an underlying “birdness”. Explains why they know that a
baby kangaroo will grow up to be a kangaroo if it’s raised by a cow. Also believe that removing an
animal’s inside parts (like in taxidermy) makes it no longer an animal. Notion of inside parts are
located near center of the body. Some people have different essentialism, eg. First Nations
people believe that if you replace a cow’s blood with pig blood it will grow up to be a pig, the
blood is the essence of “pigness”. Comes from watching animals, parent’s explanations and
reading stories, (Bear is really mad!) etc. Forms naïve biology.
Understanding People: Naïve psychology. Understand goal-oriented behaviour and intent. One-year-olds
understand intent:
Intent: Olineck and Poulin-Dubois (2009) demonstrated that if you try to pull apart something
and pretend that you can’t do it, the infant will pull it apart. They understand intent. 14 month
olds. What’s more, the parts of the brain responsible for the actions become apparent before
the adult achieves the goal, as if they knew what they were doing.
Theory of Mind: Between ages 2 and 5, infants get this. “Lemme see” or “I wanna sit”, they are
AWARE of their desires at 2 years old. They understand that they and other people have desires
and that desires can cause behaviour.
At 3, children distinguish mental world from physical. They know the difference between one girl
having a cookie and one girl thinking about a cookie. They’ll use mental verbs like “think” and
“forget” and “remember”. At age 4, start to understand other people’s actions, start to do well
on the false-belief (Sally-Anne) task. Before 3.5 years, aren’t good at this. One explanation is an
innate specialized module coming online in preschool years. Finding prompted in part by autism
disorder not getting this.