The Effects Of Deceptive Task Training On Preschool Children’s Theory Of Mind

203pre-school children (the middle and top class) from high-tech district of Zhengzhou were selected as the subject, among which111children who passed the language control problem and didn’t get full marks in the pretest tasks (unexpected location task and unexpected contents task) were screened out. The111children were allocated randomly into4groups, namely, parent-training group, teacher-training group, experimenter-training group and control group.The children in parents-training group were intervened by their parents at home, the children in teacher-training group by their teacher in the classroom, and the children in experimenter-training group by graduate students majoring in psychology in kindergarten activity room. The training materials of the three training groups were games of deception task. And the training was conducted1week later after the pretest with the way of one-to-one,15minutes each time, and twice each week, which lasted2weeks. The posttest was carried out a week later. Without intervention, the control group children took the pre-test and post-test at the same time with the trained group. At last, there were95effective subjects in the case of our study, and the results were as follows:(1)In the total theory of mind, comparison of training groups at pretest and posttest, comparison of training groups and control group at posttest, comparison of training groups and control group at difference of pretest and posttest, these comparisons can obtained that The intervention materials of deception task can promote the development of children’s theory of mind, which can be improved significantly by training;(2)There are no significant differences among the3training groups in the total theory of mind, but all of them are higher than controlled group significantly; the teacher-training group is significantly higher than controlled group, and no significant differences exist between the other groups on unexpected location task. The3training groups are significantly higher than the controlled group, and the parents-training group is significantly higher than the experimenter-training group on the task of unexpected contents;(3)There is an interaction between training groups and grades. There are no significant differences on total task of the theory of mind between parents-training group in the top class and the middle class. Besides, the total score of theory of mind of the top class children on teacher-training group, experimenter-training group and the controlled group in the post-test is significantly higher than the middle class children.