Children's difficulties with the idea of conventional truth seems consistent with current accounts of developing theories of mind. In the critical condition participants were asked to chose between a girl who shared a trait with the mother and a girl who had the trait desired by the mother. Trait types included physically heritable traits, non-heritable traits, and beliefs. Results from this study suggest that preschoolers do believe that maternal intention plays a role in the inheritance of physical traits. Study 2 was designed to determine whether children recognize limits on both the efficacy and timing of maternal intention.
Results suggest that children see some properties as outside of maternal control.
Further, they do seem to see maternal intentions as operating prior to birth. One finding of these studies is that preschoolers do not have strong intuitions that offspring will resemble their parents. In addition, children may have different intuitions about the mechanisms of inheritance than do adults. It is unclear whether young children recognize that commonsense causal knowledge is approximate and uncertain. Three studies examined beliefs about causes of illness.