Original Developmental Study On The Situation Model In The Field Of Social Information Processing

Situation Model (SM) is the knowledge concerning the specific event and episode which was constructed during the process of understanding social information. The knowledge includes the time and space of the event, entity and the relationship of entities related to the event. The theory of SM believes that the representation of SM concerns at least five dimensions, such as (1) space, (2) time, (3) entity, (4) causality and (5) intention. The former research results about SM grounded on adult cognition. The present research makes use of the former theoretic results and ripe research methods to study the developmental characteristics of students in different ages concerning the construction of SM in the process of understanding social information.The study includes six experiments. The first experiment probes into the developmental characteristics of 5 years old to 17 years old students concerning the construction of SM in the dimension of space. The second, third and the fourth experiments deal respectively with the developmental characteristics of construction of SM in the dimensions of time, causality and intention. Based on the first experiment, the fifth and sixth experiments step a further to investigate the relatedness effects of different ages in constructing SM of different spatial social information. The main results are following:1 .Grade 1 and grade 2 in primary school are the crucial period of using SM to represent spatial information. Grade 3 students in primary school can use SM to represent spatial information. There is no significant difference between males and females.2.The students that from the middle class in kindergarten to the fifth grade in primary school cannot construct temperal SM. Grade one students in junior middle school can use SM to represent temperal information. There is no significant difference between girls and boys in the aspect of temperal SM construction ability.3.Grade one students in primary school can construct SM to represent causal information. There is no significant difference between girls and boys in the aspect of causal SM construction ability.4. The children of middle class in kindergarten cannot construct intention SM. From grade one students in primary school on, the students possess the ability of construct intention SM. There is no significant difference between girls and boys in the aspect of intention SM construction ability.5. There are relatedness effects in remembering social information and there is no difference between sexes. Under the condition of different spatial social information, the difference of memory rates is significant, the superordinate-orientated relatedness effects are not different significantly, and the hyponym-orientated relatedness effects are different significantly. And under the condition of different ages, the memory rates are different significantly, the superordinate-orientated relatedness effects are not different significantly either, the hyponym-orientated relatedness effects are different significantly.