The Role Of Behavioral Outcome In Children Understands Of Intention

Understanding intention is one of the most important aspect if theory of mind, however, the directly study on this topic are limited. It has been agued that intentions are confounded with desires in most of former study where children simply match the outcome with their desire to get the right answers. They called this "matching strategy". We think this is not exactly a "strategy" for children but a simply way to deal with intention questions when they hasn't completely achieve the understanding of intention. Based on the analysis of former research, We hypothesis that before they absolutely get the understanding of intention, they will take the behavioral outcome as the evidence to justify their intention.There are two experiments in this research to validate our hypothesis. "target-hitting"(Schult 2002) paradigm including bean-bas same and touching hand same were used in experiment 1 to investigate children's performance one the four situations which were conducted by separate the intention and the desire. The four situations are 1), both intention and desire are satisfied; 2) intention satisfied but desire is not satisfied; 3) intention is satisfied but desire is satisfied; 4) both intention and desire are not satisfied. The result showed that children's performance on the situation 3 where the behavioral outcome provide the wrong answer to the intention question were significantly lower than situation 1 and situation 4 where the behavioral outcome provide the right answers. This result is accord with our hypothesis. But Schult's tasks also bring some puzzled results, that is children's performance in situation 2 which is another condition where the behavioral outcome provide the wrong answer to the intention question are as better as they did in situation 4. Experiment 2 point out this puzzled result may conducted by paradigm's limitation. The "target-hitting" paradigm may provide dabble desires to children because it call for children' skill to complete the task. Children may have another desire that succeed to toss the beanbag to/touch the right objects they tried to at the same time they want to get the prize. These "dabble desires" may provide another more effective outcome to children to justify their intention. We designed two equal tasks named secret passage game and magnet game to prevent the possible effect of "dabble desires". The results of experiment 2 showed that situation 2 is equal hard as situation 3. Children's performances on these two situations are significantly worse than situation4. Experiment two provide a strong evidences to our hypothesis that children do take behavioral outcome as the evidence of their intentions when they are not completely achieve the understanding of intention.