Training Study Of Young Children's Ability Of False Belief Understanding

The research about theory of mind has been the topic of a great deal of research.Although it is widely accepted when false belief understanding emerges, there is considerable theoretical dispute over how theory of mind ability is acquired. One way of directly assessing how theory of mind capabilities may be acquired in the course of development is through the implementation of training studies. Many researchers designed all kinds of tasks to improve the ability of theory of mind in children and accumulated massive research results in this field, the findings to date of theory of mind related training studies have been mixed. However, it is argued that various methodological issues relating to the deployment of such training schemes may play a significant role in the discrepant findings obtained.Thus,we adopted pre and posttest design to train chilren's ability of false belief understanding and assessed close-transfer and distant-transfer of training effect.The results were follows:l.In the pretest we found that there is no sex and age difference for 3-4 years old chilren's ability of false belief understanding.2.This study demonstrates that young children exposed to a false belief training regime shows only training task-specific false belief posttest improvement; that is, the only significant pre-post test increase shown by the false belief training group is on the close transfer Unexpected Transfer task, the task on which they were trained. These results suggest that task-specific strategies for close transfer posttest success were learned, rather than demonstrating a real increase in children's conceptual understanding of mental states.3.To our surprise,we could not find distant-transfer of training effect. It is possible that the generalization effects observed by Slaughter and Gopnik, and replicated by Slaughter (1998), to this task labeled a distant transfer task, were not a result of conceptual benefit provided by the training, but rather a result of a rote strategy due to the task related exposure. Thus, the lack of distant transfer generalization in the present study may not be directly in contrast to their findings.