Developmental Characteristics Of Inhibitory Control In 3-6 Year Old Children And Its Relationship To Theory Of Mind

Inhibitory control is a cognitive ability that allows individuals to control their thoughts and behaviors,suppress automatic responses,and ignore distracting stimuli in order to better process the task at hand.With the development of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience,it is found that inhibitory control is not a single cognitive structure,and different types of inhibitory control need to be verified.At the same time,since 3-6 years old is considered to be the key development period of inhibitory control,it is necessary to further explore the developmental characteristics and relationships of different types of inhibitory control.At the same time,theory of mind and inhibitory control have similar developmental stage and brain basis,and a large number of studies and theories have proved that inhibitory control and theory of mind have a close relationship.Moreover,the continuous study of the theory of mind found that the theory of mind is not a single component.Therefore,when inhibition control and theory of mind are no longer considered as a single cognitive structure,it is necessary to explore the developmental characteristics and relationship between them.Therefore,a total of 119 children aged 3-6 years old in a kindergarten in Liaoning Province were selected as research objects in this study.This paper explores the development characteristics and relationship between inhibitory control and theory of mind by experiment,and verifies whether there are different types of inhibitory control and theory of mind.Study 1: Inhibition control ability was measured by bear-dragon task,Go/No Go task,day-night Stroop task and Flanker task.Study 2: Theoretical task of mind was measured by accident location,accident content,appearance-reality task and eye-reading task.The correlation between the scores of inhibition control tasks and the scores of theory of mind tasks was analyzed.Study 3: Explore the relationship between inhibitory control and theory of mind through the data collected in Study 1 and 2.The following conclusions are drawn:(1)The inhibitory control of 3-6 years old children has a significant age difference,and increases with the development of age;The age of four is a critical period for the development of inhibitory control.(2)There is a significant age difference in the development of the theory of mind of 3-6years old children,and it is constantly improving with the growth of age;4-5 years old is a critical period for the development of children’s theory of mind.(3)Inhibition control and theory of mind have significant positive predictive effect;Response inhibition is significantly related to cognitive theory of mind,but not to affective theory of mind.Interference suppression is related to both cognitive theory and affective theory of mind.