Muslim Children’s Cognitive Development Of Allah: Understanding Of Human And Supernatural Mind

Theory of mind is the important research field of children’s cognitive development. Children’s "theory of mind" refer to children’s understanding of others’ mental state.such as faith, hope and feelings, etc. Sometimes, children also ascribe the beliefs, desires or intentions of human mental state to non-human entities and supernatural entities. Piaget called this phenomenon "Anthropomorphism". How about the connection between Children’s understanding of human mind and supernatural mind? How and when do children develop an understanding of extraordinary mental capacities?51 (effective) Muslim children aged from 3 to 5 years were selected from a national kindergarten of Yiwu city, zhejiang province. The current study adopted two improved experimental tasks of the theory of mind. The first called "Dark box task", a modified perspective-taking and appearance-reality task, is to explore the children’s understanding of the relationship between sensory input and mind and behavior. The second task called "Sealed box task", is to address the aspect of early understanding of the human mind, that is, the rule that knowledge is constrained by perception. All the children were divided into three age groups:3 years old group (15),4 years old group (17), and5 years old group (19). All children need to pass the language test and knowledge of Allah test. Then, balance method is used to offset the order effect of the two experiments. In two experimental task, all children were required to judge if the three represents (girl, superman, Allah) could correctly completed experiment tasks, and to offer their explanation for why the represent can or can not. The results showed that:1. Children’s understanding of the human mind constantly improve with the age. The turning point of children’s understanding of human perceptual limitations is 4 years old.Children of 3-years old think that humans can see the things in the dark and sealed boxes, while children of 4 to 5 years old think that humans can’t see.2. The critical age for children distinguish the difference between human mind and supernatural mind is 4 years old.3 years old Children think that Allah, superman,and even humans can offer correct answer, and can not make mistakes. Children aged 4 to 5 think that humans are more likely to make mistakes, but they still think superman and Allah has the correct belief.3. Children’s ability of ascribing superior capacity to supernatural entities constantly improve with age. Before 4 years old, most children’s attribution for supernatural can correctly answer is mainly based on the facts or unable to provide reasons. Most of the children aged 4 to 5 can attribute the superior mental characteristics (supernormal visual or supernormal mental capacity) to the supernatural entities.5-year old children have been able to offer correct attribution. They think superman can answer correctly because of the superior visual, and Allah can answer correctly because of the extraordinary mental capacity.4. There are three kinds of tendency of cognition of Allah in children aged 4 to 5: anthropomorphic, charismatic and discriminatory. But 3 years old children almost impossible to describe the Allah.The results of the current study support the "anthropomorphism" hypothesis to a certain extent:Young children cannot distinguish human mind and supernatural mind, until the children understand the limitations of human mind. In this study, however, young children did not attribute the human mind characteristics to the supernatural, namely "personification"; On the contrary, they overestimate the human mental ability, and think humans have the right faith as the supernatural, not to make mistakes.