A Study On The Development Of Theory Of Mind And Executive Function In 3-6 Years Old Children

To have a good interpersonal communication everyday,children need to know how to understand themselves and the psychology and behavior of others from different perspectives.At the same time,they need to have the executive function.These abilities play an important part in his/her cognitive development and daily life.How do children develop their executive function and theory of mind in different perspectives at different ages?What is the relationship between executive function and theory of mind in different perspectives?This paper repeats the part of Rakoczy'(2014)research on theory of mind and executive function at 3-6-year-old children,examine the function of EF reasoning TOM and the relationship between EF and TOM from different perspectives.Further study also found that most of the studies focused on the core component of theory of mind which is children's false belief,and only a few studies consider another important factors of theory of mind:desire.But without a good understanding of conflicting,desire,children cannot develop theory of mind in a satisfactory manner,so it is necessary to research on conflicting desire and the "litmus paper",namely false belief.The first study mainly focuses on the development law of children's executive function(inhibitory control and working memory),conflicting desire(self perspective and others'perspective)and the known,and the unknown searching false belief(self perspective,others'perspective),as well as the relationship among executive function,conflicting desire and searching false belief in the simulation scenarios.On the basis of Study 1,in order to overcome the problems of high dropout rates and floor effects,Study 2 adopts real scenes to compare the development of the standard and the adapted false belief.Moreover,to investigate to what extend the previous results generalize to other executive functioning measures,three different EF measures were used to study the relationship of them.The study found that the adapted search FB task ascribed not only in the inhibition effect,but also related to children's rule reasoning.The study reaches the following conclusions:(1)At different ages,relationship between children's executive function and theory of mind in different perspectives is different.The development of executive function and theory of mind in different perspectives are significantly different,and out of sync.The ability of executive function is developed earlier than theory of mind.(2)The 3-6-year-old children can reason from different perspectives,and they achieve better results when reasoning from self-perspective than from other people's perspective.(3)Different perspectives of theory of mind and executive function are significantly correlated,and both can predict each other.(4)Compared with the research paradigm of simulation operation,children can better understand the research paradigm of real situation operation.(5)Age and language are closely related to the development of children's theory of mind and executive function,and is highly capable of explaining theory of mind and executive function.