Facilitating Theory Of Mind Understanding In Young Children Of 3-4 Years Old: A Training Study

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. A large body of empirical findings using false belief paradigms suggests that a fully developed theory of mind is acquired around the fourth year of life. Although it is widely accepted when false belief understanding emerges, there is considerable theoretical dispute over how theory of mind ability is acquired, furthermore, the development of the human capability to acknowledge, interpret and understand that the mind possesses mental states which serve to guide and interpret behavior has remarkable individual differences. Recently, many researches investigated the influential factors of theory of mind. Although the previously studies have been highly suggestive of the importance of social factors in theory of mind development, most of these studies were correlative in design; thus, causal relations cannot be identified. To assess the causal influences on children's use of mental terms and understanding of false belief, researchers must experimentally manipulated children's exposure to information about mental states.One way of directly assessing how theory of mind capabilities may be acquired in the course of development is through the implementation of training studies. Many researchers designed some kinds of tasks to improve the ability of theory of mind in children and accumulated massive research results in this field, the findings to date of theory of mind related training studies have been mixed. It is argued that various methodological issues such as entry criterion, training method and intensity, training scheme, training generalization, training procedure may play a significant role in the discrepant finding obtained. In the present study, we attempted to use naturalistic concept training (through story to develop the children's theory of mind understanding) and the task-specific training which some researchers have conducted to address the question of whether concept training rather than task-specific training can be effective.This study was made up of four phases: subjects selection, training and two test. There were altogether 122 children taken from three kindergartens in Longquanyi, Chengdu. The selection criterion consisted of a language control task and two classic false belief tasks (the...