The Experimental Study On The Training 3-4 Years-old Children's Theory Of Mind

Theory of mind was children' s understanding of the mental states of the self and the mental states of the other. In recent 20 years children' s theory of mind was one of the most hottest research areas in developmental psychology, but there were only a few training studies about it. The aims of this training study were to test related opinions about theory of mind, explore the laws of children' s understanding theory of mind, find the ways to train children to understand theory of mind, improve children' s skill of social intercourse, and provide relevant support for treating children with autism. This study was made up of three phases: pretest, lasting one week; training, lasting two weeks; posttest, lasting one week. There were altogether 129 subjects taken from three kindergartens in Changsha City. The pretest consisted of a language control task and two classic false belief tasks, and only those children, who failed three test questions from two false belief tasks and passed the language control task, were trained. After pretest, only 56 subjects (two subjects were lost) were randomly assigned to 3 training groups: belief group, perception group, control group, and there were 18 subjects per training group. The training phase consisted of two sessions, and subjects were trained with one task each session. The belief group was trained on two false belief tasks, the perception group was trained on two visual perspective-taking tasks, and the control group was trained on two number conservation tasks.During training, experimenter gave subjects feedback according to their performance and discussed with them. After training, all subjects received five posttest tasks: box task, transfer task, appearance-reality task, sources task and number conservation task.Results showed that :(1) belief group and perception group outperformed control group on the box task, but belief group outperformed perception group on the same task;(2) belief group and perception group had no transfer effect on the transfer task, but had transfer effect on the appearance-reality task and sources task;(3) control group outperformed belief group and perception group on the number conservation task, but had no effective in improving children' s performance on the theory of mind tasks;(4) the theory of mind training was more effective for the older than the younger children.