| Inhibitory Control, IC, refers to an ability by which an individual inhibits his respond to an irrelevant stimulus when he pursues cognitive representations. The researches about Executive Function (EF) and Theory of Mind (ToM) suggest that the two are correlated in many aspects. Among the explanations to those correlations, the interpretation stating that EF and ToM have some shared components is prevalent and sounder. IC is such a shared component.Many researchers attempted to explore the mechanism of the correlations between EF and ToM. Among these researches, what has been mostly concerned by the researchers is the correlations of this two constructs resulting from individuals' differences. However, some exteriors factors such as experiment tasks are often neglected by the previous researchers. Because existed researches has been carried out with the standard experimental tasks of EF and ToM, for the subjects the difficulty level if these tasks is too high and it is impossible to avoid the correlation resulting from the "floor effect" for its difficulty. Thus, it is necessary to develop some experiment tasks with appropriate difficulty levels to further investigate their correlation.Therefore, in this research, on the base of the hypothesis that IC is a shared component of EF and ToM, we divide the difficulty level of inhibitory control into three degree: high, medium, and low. To respond to these three degrees respectively, we adopt three types of False Belief tasks, A1, A2, A3 , which represent ToM, and three Day/Night tasks B1, B2, B3, which represent EF to investigate the role ofdifficulty levels of inhibitory control in the correlation of infants' EF and ToM.In Experiment 1, we choose 48 4-year-olds as the subjects, use single factor and within subjects design, and investigate the disparities among tasks A1, A2, A3 and among tasks B1, B2, B3, to validate the rationality of dividing the difficulty level of inhibitory control into three degrees. The results suggest that the division of the difficulty level of inhibitory control in False Belief tasks and Day/Night tasks into three degrees are rational, and both tasks A1, A2, A3 and tasks B1, B2, B3 are significantly different, thus they can be used in the further research about the correlation of EF and ToM. In Experiment 2, to investigate the development of and the correlation and its development between EF and ToM, we adopt 33 3-year-olds, 45 4-year-olds, 35 5-year-olds and 27 6-year-olds as the subjects, and use tasks A1, A2, A3 and tasks B1, B2, B3 with the mixed experimental design of 3 x 4 (difficulty levels x ages, the former is within subjects designed and the latter is cross subjects designed) to cany out this experiment.The results of this research are as follows:1. Inhibitory control is the common component of EF and ToM.2. The difficulty levels of inhibitory control have a great influence on the development of infants' EF. Generally speaking, the time about 4-year old is the key phase of the development of infants' EF with the most difficult IC; the development of infants' EF with the moderately difficult IC has two key phases, about the 4- and 5-year olds; and the key phase of infants' EF with the lest difficult IC is before the 3-year old.3. The difficulty levels of inhibitory control have a great influence on the development of infants' ToM. The key phase of the development of ToM with the most difficult IC is not obvious during 3 to 6 years old; the key phase of the development of ToM with moderately difficult IC is around 4-year old; and the development of ToM with the moderately difficult IC has two key phases, about the 4-and 5-year olds.4. The difficulty level of inhibitory control is an important factor which has a great influence on the correlation between EF and ToM. This is manifested in the following 3 aspects: (1) the correlation degree between these two constructs can be influenced by the difficulty levels of inhibitory control; (2) the development trend of their correlation with the development of ages can em...
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