A Research On The Relationship Between Theory Of Mind And Executive Function In ADHD

Researches about the relationship between theory of mind and executive function are very popular in developmental psychology recent years, but there is no accordant conclusion until now. Russell considered that EF is the base of ToM; Perner deemed that meta-representation in ToM is the bedrock of the development of EF, Zelazo thought that the development of EF and ToM is parallel .the basic of them is condition reasoning.Most of the Researches on the relationship between them are based on nature children, in order to explore the question, researchers try to study some exceptional children, such as children with autism, deaf children, and hyperactivity-impulsivity and attention deficit (ADHD).this research is part of these studies.We selected 124 children with ADHD and age-matched control group ,half of them are 3 years old to 5 years old ,the other of them are 7 years old to 9 years old .The younger were given some tasks on theory of mind ,such as the Unexpected Location Task and Unexpected Content Task, and other two different executive function (EF) tasks: Day/Night task and DCCS .The older were given two types theory of mind tasks ,one is Second -order theory of mind tasks and the other is faux pas task. Beside these tasks, there is one EF tasks: stroop test. The conclusion are :(1) Whether we consider 3 years old to 5 years old children as a whole group or not, the group at risk of ADHD showed impaired performance relative to the control group on Day/Night task.(2) If we consider ADHD of 3 years old to 5 years old as a group of whole, the group at risk of ADHD showed impaired performance relative to the control group on both before-switch and after-switch in the DCCS task. On the other hand, we compare every year separately, we will find that there are no significant differences among 3, 4, 5 years of age preschoolers in the before-switch tasks of DCCS. The results of 4, 5 years of age normal preschoolers are better than those children with ADHD. 3 years of age preschoolers are same; there is no difference between natural children and ADHD. Their performances are both very poor.(3) 3,4, 5 years of age preschoolers have no impairment at all on the theory of mind tasks. In another word, the group at risk of ADHD showed impaired performance relative to the control group on several executive tasks but no impairment at all on the theory of mind tasks.(4) 7, 8, 9 years of age students at risk of ADHD showed impaired performance relative to the control group on executive function tasks──stroop task.(5) Using aggregate scores were found 7,8,9 years of age students have no difference between ADHD and normal ones in theory of mind tasks. It means that children at risk of ADHD showed no impaired performance relative to the control group on theory of mind tasks.