Research On Children's Theory Of Mind And The Use Of It

Since Theory of Mind (ToM for short) has become one of the most important branches in the field of developmental cognition. Under the above setting, the present study through the method of experiment and observation has a research on 4-year old children's ToM and the factors influencing the development of ToM.The paper includes introduction, an experimental study, a case study, and conclusion. The significance, literature review, including the theoretical studies on the models of ToM and the factors influencing the development of ToM, research design, and the research questions are included in the part of introduction. In the part of experimental research, we use the two tasks, the unexpected-location task and the unexpected-content task, to elicit data on children's use of ToM, aiming at obtaining their performance in different tasks, the developmental features, including those of age, gender and the consistency of the two tasks. In the part of case study, through method of observation, we study a child's actual performance of ToM in natural setting, having an elaboration on the features of ToM. In conclusion, we specify the findings of the research and the problems unsolved in the present study.The findings of the research are that the performance of children of 4 years old is better in the unexpected-location task than in the unexpected-content task, showing that many children can distinguish others'false belief in pretending games. The second finding is that, though there are some 4-year-old children have a high level in ToM, most do not completely develop such ability. The third finding involves the age developmental feature, in which children's ToM development is significantly correlated with their age, but such development is not linear. The fourth finding involves the gender feature, showing that gender is not an important variable in children's development on ToM because in the unexpected-location task and the unexpected- content task, the female children's performance and that of the male children are not significantly different. The fifth finding is about the consistency of the two experimental tasks. Correlational analysis shows the significant correlation between the unexpected-location task and the unexpected-content task, which implies the two tasks eliciting similar trait. The sixth finding is about the features of ToM. On the basis of the observation, twelve types of the use of ToM are concluded: distinguishing (1) the state of mind from physical world, (2) the superficial appearance from the truth, (3) what is"seen"from what is"known", (4) working out the intention and motivation, using (5) the behavior of lying and cheating, (6) act of teaching, (7) the words of the state of mind, (8) strategies, (9) understanding jokes and (10) the mood of others, (11) doing role plays in the games, (12) persuading others. The last finding is about the factors influencing the children's use of ToM in natural setting, including the instant situation, age, and their experience, which is closely related to the variables such as the experience of the parents'reading to the child, the social interaction and pretending games.The significance of the present research is that the fact that the 4-year old Chinese children have a lower level than the counterpart of the Western countries based on the existing research, which shows that the development in ToM is influenced by culture and environments, encourages our researchers to do further explorations on how children develop their ToM in Chinese culture, but not to adopt findings from Western setting indiscriminately. Meanwhile, the types of ToM concluded from the present qualitative study are good guild for the researchers to save more time and energy in the further similar studies. Practically, the present research reminds our preschool educators to be conscious of the difference in children's development of ToM because of region and children background difference, and to actually study such difference, further implementing it in education, achieving the purpose that every child get help from educational programs to socialize, and that every children has a chance to be fully cultivated in their sociocognition ability.