Research On The Development Characteristics Of Deaf Students’ Implicit Theory Of Mind

Theory of mind refers to an individual’s understanding of his or her own and other people’s psychological states,such as needs,beliefs,intentions,feelings,etc.,which can affect the development of an individual’s academic achievement,mental health,social cognition and other aspects.In recent years,some researchers have put forward two systems theory,namely explicit theory of mind and implicit theory of mind.It is believed that the development time of the implicit mental system in individuals is earlier than that of the explicit theory of mind.It tracks the mental state in a fast and effective way,has the characteristics of high efficiency,implicit and automatic process,and is not affected by the language ability.It is worth noting that the explicit theory of mind can flexibly pass the false beliefs task in various situations,while the implicit theory of mind has limitations in the processing of false beliefs.Existing research on the development of theory of mind of deaf students is mostly carried out through false belief tasks.The performance of deaf students in false belief tests changes significantly around the age of13,but the critical period for normal children to pass false belief tasks is Around 4 years old.The above results may be affected by factors such as language,family environment,etc.,causing the development level of deaf students to lag far behind normal children.Therefore,this research attempts to start from the perspective of implicit theory of mind.On the one hand,it explores whether deaf students have implicit and unconscious processing of the views of others;on the other hand,it studies the implicit psychology of deaf students and normal students at different stages.Differences in the development of theories and comparison of differences within deaf students.The study used the first-level viewpoint-taking task developed by Drayton et al.(2010).Experiment 1 takes deaf students and normal students at three different ages in late childhood,adolescence,and early adulthood as the research objects.It explores how deaf students and normal students face the same and inconsistent self-perspective information and others’ perspectives.The characteristics of angle information and other angle information processing.Experiment 2 takes 9-12-year-old orallanguage deaf students and acquired sign-language deaf students as the research objects.Experiment 1 found that the main effect of age group is significant,indicating that the implicit theory of mind ability of deaf students and normal students will change with age.The main effect of the test type is significant.Compared with the deaf students,the normal students have a higher accuracy rate in the task and a faster reaction speed.But more importantly,deaf students have a stronger self-conflict effect(the correct rate or the difference in response time under self-consistent and self-inconsistent conditions),that is,deaf students will be more vulnerable to others when judging from the perspective of self influence,this shows to a certain extent that deaf students are more likely to think about problems from the perspective of others,and have a stronger tendency to altruism or the ability to automate theory of mind.In Experiment 2,we further found that in response time indicators,although both spoken-language deaf students and acquired sign-language deaf students showed obvious selfconflict effects,the effect intensity of spoken-language deaf students was greater than that of acquired sign-language deaf students.Spoken-language deaf students have stronger altruism or automatic theory of mind ability than acquired sign-language deaf students.1.Deaf lives in the unconscious and implicit processing of other people’s opinions and has an implicit theory of mind;2.Deaf students have significant age differences in the development of implicit theory of mind,and this ability will increase with age;3.Deaf children have a stronger effect of self-conflict on the task of implicit theory of mind;4.Compared with acquired sign deaf students,oral deaf students performed better in implicit theory of mind tasks.This research has enriched the previous conclusions and found that the implicit theory of mind of deaf students continues to develop and improve with age,and there are also development differences within deaf students,which may be caused by language and teaching environment.The main factor of this difference.Therefore,this research proposes educational strategies from environmental atmosphere,activity methods,teaching methods,etc.,in order to promote the development of the theory of implicit psychology of deaf students.