4-8Years Old Children’s Understanding Of Mind Wandering And Its Relationship With The Theory Of Mind

Mind Wandering is just like daydreaming in daily life, which is gradually arousing the interest of domestic and foreign researchers, mainly including the frequency and content of mind wandering, the neural mechanisms and its function studies. Studying mind wandering from the view of children’s development is a significant problem, which helps us to understand the development of children’s awareness system, and the role it plays in children’s cognitive and social development. In the field of children’s cognitive development research, the theory of mind has been occupied an important position. Studies show that the development of theory of mind and children’s fantasy games such as pretend play training exist significant correlation. The view of the simulation theory is that children can imitate others’ behavior to judge their mind, explain and forecast their behavior during a fantasy game. As a spontaneous mental simulation phenomenon, when does mind wandering begin to be realized by the individual, and whether its development is related to the development of children’s theory of mind? This study concerned about the4to8years old children’s development of mind wandering and its relationship with the theory of mind.We designed two studies to try to demonstrate the above problems. In the first study, ninety children from4to8years old were assessed on their understanding of mind wandering including its internal and spontaneous as well as their attitude through the individual interviews. By contrasting to the adult experience, we understood the developmental characteristics of the children from4to8years and the key age to understanding mature of such concepts. In the second study, considering the function of children’s mind wandering, we although selected4to8years old children to further examine the relationship between children’s mind wandering and the theory of mind through the control of intellectual and linguistic factors, so as to provide new ideas and methods to educate preschool children better.We got the main research conclusion as follows:(1) Compared with4and6years old children,8years old children had mature introspection. They could report their own conscious experience in the resting state;(2)4to8years old children could recognize that the mind wandering is generated by individual brains, rather than external environment or the other organs of the body except the brains;(3)8years old children could recognize that mind wandering has involuntary characteristics, mind wandering is the process that occurs without the control of subjective intention and willingness;(4) Children’s attitudes towards mind wandering influenced by the factor of education, they thought individuals should concentrate while doing something, but young children’s concept would influenced by whether the content of mind wandering was positive or not. With aging and the deepening of education, children general tended to recognize that individuals should concentrate on their work in the task circumstance, they developed the stable concept of concentration on the work;(5) Whether4years old children consciously experienced mind wandering and their development of higher levels of theory of mind, such as faux pas recognition, existed a significant positive correlation.