Children's Psychological Development Of The Theory And Working Memory, Metacognition Research

The development of Children's theory of mind has been a research focus during the past two decades. Desire and belief are acknowledged to be pivotal in theory of mind, or children's understanding of their own and others' mental states. Despite the acknowledged importance of both belief and desire in children's theory of mind, the bulk of the research has investigated the development of belief understanding and, there are few researches on the development of both belief and desire; It is widely accepted that the two mental states of belief and desire are the most important ones for the explanation and prediction of human action. For younger children, they primarily apply desire rather than belief, so they are named "desire psychologist" ;However older children can connect belief with desire to reason, so they are named "desire-belief psychologist". This research try to probe into the development of the two models in the early stage of children's school years as well as the existence of cultural difference between them and the relationship between children's theory of mind and their working memory,metacognition.Two experiments were designed. The first one inspected the development of belief and desire in theory of mind in children of 3-5 years old. Researchers interviewed children using clinical interview method with stories and pictures. The second experiment probed into the relationship among children's theory of mind,working memory and metacognition. Results are followed as such:1,False belief understanding was different from desire understanding; the former appeared earlier and was a necessary but insufficient condition to the latter.3-year-old children were more prone to apply desire to predict other's behavior, and with the age children gradually use belief to handle the relation between mental states and real world.2,Generally, there was no evident cultural difference between Chinese and foreign children's desire understanding. 3,The development of children's false belief understanding and desire understanding didn't have gender differences;4,"Theory of Mind" of 3-5 years old children develop constantly, and 4 years old is the key age in obtaining" Theory of Mind";5,There were significant correlation among unexpected content task,unexpected location task and working memory task, which demonstrated that the higher children's information processing ability was, the higher children's theory of mind ability was.6,There were evident correlation among unexpected content task,unexpected location task and metacognitive task, which suggested there was somewhat developmental consensus between children's theory of mind and metacognition;7,There were significant correlation among children's theory of mind,working memory and metacognition even if the age factor was controlled.