A Cross-Cultural Study Of Synchrony To The Development Of Children's Theory Of Mind

The study of ToM, which began in 1980s, is a new direction in the field of cognitive development. The theory of mind does not mean an actual scientific theory, but refers to the individual's understanding and cognition of his and others' mental states such as desires, beliefs and intentions, and the ability to predict and explain others' behaviors. The study was based on two aspects, as the paper proposed, one was the study of theory; the other was that of experiment. From the two aspects, this study tried to enrich the development of theory of mind, establish some foundation and obtain evidence of the educational development and reform in nationalities areas.This research mainly discussed ToM and its achievements from six aspects: 1. the explanation of key terms, including theory of mind, synchrony and decalages, cross-cultural study, false belief task, unexpected location task, unexpected content task. 2. the definition of ToM. The research of ToM on developmental psychology can be dated back to the study of Premack and Woodruff (1978), which aimed to explore if chimpanzee had the ability to achieve ToM. ToM is not an actual scientific theory, but refers to the individual's understanding and cognition of his and others' mental states such as desires, beliefs and intentions, and the ability to predict and explain others' behaviors. 3. The classic research on ToM. The study of ToM deals with children's mental states such as beliefs, desires, perceptions, intentions, feelings and so on. However, to test whether the children have some level of ToM is based on the false belief experimental paradigm, that is, unexpected location task and unexpected content task. 4. The development in the study of ToM. At present, most researches on ToM focus on children's beliefs in others and the cognitive development of the relationship between the beliefs and behaviors. 5. The current trend of the research. Early research mainly focused on thedevelopment of children's false belief, appearance-reality and visual perspective-taking of children aged from 3 to 5. Now researchers have extended their researches to other aspects, for example, to study other mental states except false belief and put forward a series of theories to explain ToM of babies and school age children, and study the diversity of ToM. 6. Problems in the study of ToM and its future trend. Improvements should be made in the experimental paradigm, research field, research scope, theory model and the application. In the near future, How ToM's appears and develops under differentcultures, different languages and different social experiences, and how it influences the social activities will undoubtedly be the mainstream of the research.In this paper, an experiment examined 210 children of 3-5 years old was done. These children came from different nationalities such as Ha'ni, Yi, and Han, among them, 120 children attended the dollish experiment and 90 children took part in the real game experiment. Four ToM tasks were designed according to two classic ToM task experimental models. Under different experimental conditions and ToM tasks, children, living in the same area but of different nationalities, and those living in the different areas but of the same nationality, performed differently. Based on these findings, many significant results have been got. 1. Children's ToM would develop with the increase of their age. 2. Children's performance in different ToM tasks had the characteristics of synchrony as a whole. 3. The diversity of nationalities and cultural background played a less important role in the development of children's ToM. 4. Children's performance varied with the task conditions. 5. Compared with foreign children, the development of ToM being tested in this research fell behind.