Children's Attributions 16
artificialism (Piaget, 1969), Petrovich (1997) found that, although 4-year-olds know that humans
make machines and God does not, when asked to account for the origins of natural objects such
as large rocks or mountains, they gave God the credit and not people. Similarly, several studies
have uncovered evidence that 4-year-old (and, in some cases, older) children believe magicians
are a special type of agent able to perform actions that apparently violate natural causation
(Chandler & Lalonde, 1994; Rosengren & Hickling, 1994). Further, recent research suggests that
4- and 5-year-olds appreciate differences in perceptual abilities of different agents across sensory
modalities (Richert & Barrett, 2003) and appreciate that God is more likely than humans to
possess various forms of perceptual knowledge (Barrett et al., 2001).