Chapter 8 - Sperlonga and Beyond

Summary

Some developmental researchers plough a long, straight furrow. I can claim nothing so unwavering. I trace instead a career that has meandered, both geographically and intellectually, with successive forays into topics that have at best a subterranean connection to each other. In the Netherlands, I studied children’s developing understanding of different aspects of emotion, and more broadly their theory of mind. In England, I studied children’s imagination, including their pretending, role-play, reasoning, counterfactual thinking and emotional reactions to works of fiction. In the United States, I conducted studies on children’s willingness to trust testimony from informants who vary in their history of accuracy, their membership of particular groups and their levels of relevant expertise as well as studies of cross-cultural variation in the pattern of testimony that children receive – especially with respect to invisible or hard-to-observe phenomena in the domains of religion and science.