An Investigation Of Three-to-Five-Year-Old Children's Theory Of Mind Development Using Deceptive Task In Pretend Play

Premack and Woodruff first presented the concept of "theory of mind" in 1978 in their research of chapineezes. From then on, lots of researchers did research on the theoretical and empirical aspects of theory of mind, which made it one of the most active areas of developmental psychology during the resent 20 years.Theory of mind refers to the understanding of the mental state of oneself or others and the causal explanation and prediction of the sequent behaviors. According to the opinion of domain specificity theory, the knowledge of mental state is one of the basic cognitive domains of humanbeings. It has important influnce on our daily life and has connection with the development of children's moral, social and communicative abilities.In the early 80s of the 20th century, psychologist Wimmer and Perner first suggested the research method of "false belief. Researchers believed that passing the false belief task is the sign of children's obtaining of the ability of theory of mind. Here, "belief refers that one thinks something is true , it reflects the outside world and it is the mental representation of the outside world. From this belief one obtain the understanding of the world. If the belief is correspondent with the objective world, it is true. Otherwise, it is false. The classical researches using the false belief task suggest that children obtain the ability of theory of mind at about 4 years old. 4 year-old children can explain how other people can hold beliefs different from their own and that people's behavior is based on their beliefs. Based on the empirical research result, researcher tried to provide the theoretical explanations, among which the following three are the most representative ones: modularity theory, simulation theory and theory theory. Modularity theory emphasizes the physiological basis of theory of mind, simulation theory explains how children first obtain the understanding of others' mind, and theory theory emphasizes the systematization, continuity and consistency of our knowledge about mind.With the development of the research on theory of mind, some researcher begin to question about the research method and the result of the classical false belief tasks. They argue that the classical false belief task misjudged children's ability of theory of mind. The theoretical explanations based on the empirical results also faced great challenge. First, they argue that children's failure on false belief task is probably because of the deficiency of language ability since usually the false belief task is telling a story to children. Only when children understand the story and the questions of the researchers can they answer the questions correctly. Second, the change of task mode can influence children's performance on the false belief task.Among the changed forms of task mode, the research of children's deceptive behavior has become a new trend and a specific research area of theory of mind. Deception here refers to the behavior aims at creating other people's false belief hence to make them behave wrongly. If children can deceive successfully, they first have to predict the mental state of the person they want to deceive and at the same time know the difference between other people's mental state and their own, also they must have clear purpose to deceive others. The development of children's theory of mind is the key factor of the maturation of their deceptive behavior. Many researchers have pointed out that deceptive ability is one of the most important, ability of children. Only after obtaining a complete theory of mind can children obtain the ability to deceive. Some researchers even look on deception as a sign of the understanding of theory of mind.The present study attempts to put the deceptive task in the pretend play. From theoretical perspective, some researchers suggest that both pretend play and theory of mind depend on the understanding of mental representation. In the empirical studies, many researchers find that pretend play has positive relation to social understanding...