It's surprising, but apparently young children assume that others are omniscient and they have to learn that the rest of us in the world have limited knowledge. They know that they themselves are not omniscient of course, but they seem to automatically conclude that others -- even their parents -- know absolutely everything.
That might be helpful for parenting at times, but it also suggests that belief in super-powerful gods and spirits might come naturally to human beings.
For example, in a study in Mexico led by Nicola Knight of the University of Oxford, Maya children aged four to seven were shown a gourd that usually holds tortillas. With the opening covered, the experimenter asked children what was inside.
After answering "tortillas", they were shown -- much to their surprise -- that it actually contained boxer shorts. The experimenter then covered the opening again and asked whether various agents would know what was inside. The agents included the Catholic god, known as Diyoos, the Maya sun god, the forest spirits, a bogeyman-like being called Chiichi' and a human. In Mayan culture, Diyoos is all seeing and all knowing, the sun god knows everything that happens under the sun, the forest spirits' knowledge is limited to the forest and Chiichi' is just a nuisance.
The youngest children answered that all the agents would know what was in the gourd. By age seven, the majority thought that Diyoos would know that the gourd contained shorts but the human would think it contained tortillas. They were also sensitive to the shades of difference in the other supernatural agents' level of knowledge (Journal of Cognition and Culture, vol. 8: p. 235). Similar things have been found with Albanian, Israeli, British and American children.
Source: New Scientist, 17 March 2011
It's not surprising that humans would naturally see purpose, design, and agency around us. That sort of assumption can be very helpful when it comes to survival and doesn't create a lot of cost when you're wrong. The assumption of omniscience, though, doesn't seem to fall in that same category. Or maybe it does? Maybe it's helpful to assume that others know what you know instead of assuming that you'll be able to keep something secret?
Regardless, it's an assumption that quickly starts changing -- unlike the other automatic assumptions like agency and design. This may mean that it's less a survival strategy and more just an error that is quickly corrected through experience. If young children are not taught about gods and spirits, will they fail to attribute omniscience to those beings when learning about them much later in life?
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