Mechanisms In Children's Belief-desire Reasoning

The Research of Children's Theory of Mind has been the most significant research field of developmental psychology since 1980s. If children are able to understand that people have their own desires, beliefs and independent explanations of the world, and also have recognized that people would behave on basis of the above-mentioned mental states, they will own the "Theory of Mind". As important mental states, belief and desire are regarded as the core concepts in the domain of Theory of Mind by most of researchers. Therefore, the developmental characteristics and mechanisms of children's belief-desire reasoning become the main part of the domain of Theory of Mind research.In this dissertation, the major empirical findings and theoretical viewpoints with regard to the development of children's theory of mind and belief-desire reasoning in the last three decades were presented comprehensively. We found that long before researchers paid more attention to children's performance in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and the relationship with some relevant abilities. Up to now, there are few focuse on mechanisms of belief-desire reasoning. The important findings and the main arguments of the mechanisms of the belief-desire reasoning are analyzed and summarized, including when children begin to have the ability of belief-desire reasoning, how to explain the dramatic change on their development process (the explanations of conceptual change factors and performance change factors), how to accomplish the task of belief-desire reasoning (mainly ToMM-SP model) as well.At present, there are few systematically empirical researches about the mechanism in children's belief-desire reasoning in China. Therefore, in theexperimental parts of the dissertation, the author systematically investigated the mechanisms of Chinese children's belief-desire reasoning with the methods of task-analysis and the ToMM-SP model proposed by foreign researchers. Four serials of experiments are focusing on the age characteristics, the developmental mechanisms with change, the mechanisms of the performance in various tasks, the processing mechanism in children's belief-desire reasoning. The main conclusions are as follows:1. As age increased, the 3 to 5 year olds children perform better and better in the belief-desire reasoning tasks, but there exists no significant differences on sex. In the standard false-belief task and partial true-belief task, 4-year-olds begin to demonstrate the capability of belief-desire reasoning, and 5-year-olds can pass the experiment tasks easily. Children show the similar development tendency on the standard false-belief task and partial true-belief task.2. The operations will exert significant impact to children's performance in the false-belief tasks. Children perform different behavior in different tasks: Children perform better on the "Look First" false-belief task, "Contrast" false-belief task and "Disappear" false-belief task than on the standard false-belief task.3. There exist significant differences of children's performance on different types of belief-desire reasoning tasks. Children perform worse on avoidance false-belief tasks than on the approach false-belief tasks or the avoidance true-belief task. 4-year-olds can completely finish the avoidance true-belief tasks. Most of 4-year-olds and almost all the 5-year-olds can complete approaching false-belief task. Only the minority of 4-year-olds and about half of 5-year-olds can pass avoidance false-belief task.4. Children perform similarly on Think question of the avoidance false-belief task and the avoidance partial true-belief task, but behave differently on Behavior Predict questions. The passing rate on the Predict questions in the former task is apparent lower than that of the later task. The findings support the ToMM-SP model and the explanations of Selective Process, which predict that avoidance false-belief tasks are difficult to perform for children because the "double inhibitions" are needed in the task execution. 5. "The inhibition of inhibition model" can better describe the cognitive processing of children when accomplishing the belief-desire reasoning tasks. The findings demonstrate that the inhibitions of belief and desire are generated in parallel and in such a way that they inhibit each other (cancel out) in the avoidance false-belief task. "Recalculation of belief" is executed in the process.