The Relationship Between .3-5 Year-old Child Theory Of Mind, Fok Development Research

Metacognition and ToM are two important issues in the research filed of children's cognitive development. According to their weights in developmental research respectively, it is of great significance to explore the relationship between them. In fact, the relation involves some basic mechanisms of cognitive development. There are various opinions among developmental psychologists on it so far, but none has experimental evidence. Flavell's hypothesis is the most representative that ToM is the foundation of metacognition development.This study tries to explore the relation between ToM and metacognition. 3-5-year-old children were measured on ToM and FOK. Two classical ToM tasks are used to test young children's ToM ability, the false-belief task and representation-change task. Feeling-of-knowing (FOK), the index of metacognitive monitoring, is used to test metacogniton ability. The results approved again that ToM ability improves substantially in the 5th year in Chinese children. It was also found that the accuracy of FOK judgment emerges early in the 3rd year. The accuracy of FOK judgment declines a little when children are 5 years of age, while the stability of FOK judgment arises. As far as the relation between ToM and the accuracy of FOK judgment is concerned, their developing paths are different from each other. They develop synchronously in the 3rd year and the 4th year, and change both greatly in the 5th year, with different directions. The ToM ability improves substantially in the 5th year, but the accuracy of FOK judgment declines. The results suggest that the accuracy of FOK judgment is independent of ToM. On the other hand, ToM, the use of memorial clues when making FOK judgment and the stability of FOK judgment develop visibly synchronously with age.