Meta-Analysis Of The Relation Between Children's Theory Of Mind And Executive Function

From the day when"theory of mind"was first proposed in 1970's, it has been one of the most robust fields in cognitive psychology. In recent years researchers are focusing their attention on the topic of relationship between children's theory of mind and executive function. The study on this field will help people understand the inner mechanism of the development of children's theory of mind as well as the individual differences. It will provide not only a theoretical guide for developing and training children's ability of theory of mind, but also a foundation of theory on curing autistics or ADD. Now researchers have developed some theories and a certain kind of research paradigm, but it has not been concluded because of different methods and different materials they used.Meta-analysis is a new method of literature review which integrates qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. It is the analysis of analyses, which is much better than the traditional literature review. This paper is intended to analyze the previous findings of the relation between theory of mind and executive function by using meta-analysis to achieve a more scientific and comprehensive conclusion.In terms of the operation processes of meta-analysis, the paper firstly set a series of criterion for literature searching. (1) The topic of literature should be executive function and theory of mind; the content should be mainly talked about the relationship between the two. (2) The subjects are the healthy preschool children. That means those whose subjects are autistics or ADD should be excluded. (3) The literature should include the tasks of theory of mind or executive functions, or the both. (4) The literature has to report at least one kind of statistic data. According to the criterion, finally 14 articles including 16 experimental researches were selected for the meta-analysis. All of experiments involved 1088 children in all.After data extracting and meta-analysis treat, the results and conclusions are as follows:(1) The publication bias. The funnel plot shows that most studies appeared in the middle of the graph, and were distributed symmetrically around the mean. That means the literature selected were somewhat perfect. However, in the absence of publication bias the studies should concentrate toward the top of the graph, so there was still some bias in our research. Every literature weighted relatively balanced in meta-analysis. Their weights interval is 3.83% to 10.77%. So the findings will not be influenced strongly.(2) The correlation between theory of mind and executive function. The results showed strong correlation, which proved and strengthened the previous research findings—there is close relation between children's theory of mind and executive function.(3) The problem of executive function predicting theory of mind. The mean effect size is 0.324 which belongs to middle size. To some extend it proved the prediction of EF. However the homogeneity test did not show a significant result. So the statistic of meta-analysis can not conclude the EF's prediction. One of possibilities is that maybe one of EF components predicts a certain kind of theory of mind tasks, but we can not conclude that all EF tasks predict TOM.