The Relationship Between 3-5-year-old Child's Theory Of Mind And Inhibitory Control

Exploring how the children gain theory of mind and seeking its related factorshave become one of the most popular research fields in cognitive developmentalpsychology.Basing on former researches, with the nature experimental method weexplored the child's theory of mind especially on its task specificity by inviting3-5-year-old subjects. We also linked child's theory of mind with the core of executivefunction---inhibitory control to see if they were significantly related. Furthermore, weexpanded the inhibitory control research to the initiatively inhibitory control tasks toexplore the relationship between child's theory of mind and self-imposed delay ofgratification, which was the core of initiativly inhibitory control tasks.The results of this research supported the home and abroad researches ondevelopment of child's theory of mind once more.We believe that 3-5years old is thevital period for children to develop their theory of mind. We also supported the resultsof abroad experiments on the relationship between theory of mind and passitivelyinhibitory control and got the significantly correlation. In the discussion part, the taskspecificity of child's theory of mind was involved and we also explained whydifferent inhibitory control tasks differently related to theory of mind, especially therelationship between the card sorting task and theory of mind task.