Psychological Development and Education ›› 2003, Vol. 19 ›› Issue (3): 23-28.

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A examination on task-specificity of young children’s theory-of-mind performance

DENG Ci-ping   

  1. Department of Psychology, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062
  • Online:2003-07-15 Published:2003-07-15

Abstract: Ninety Chinese 3~5-year-olders' understanding of appearance-reality distinction and false belief were examined in a series of tasks with different materials,and the task-specificity of young children's performance and the effect of material on performance were also explored in the study.It was found that young children's performance on these two theory-of-mind tasks showed to be markedly task-specific,even the assessment standards of appearance-reality distinction and false belief understanding were matched in these tasks.The results also showed that there was a great material effect on young children's performance on both appearance-reality distinction tasks and false belief understanding tasks.It seemed that these results favored the hypothesis of domain-specific knowledge acquisition (Carey,1985) than the representation-deficit hypothesis (Flavell,1988; Perner,1991).

Key words: development of theory-of-mind, appearance-reality distinction, understanding of false belief, task specificity

CLC Number: 

  • B844.1
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[1] WANG Yi-wen, ZHANG Wen-xin. Development of Theory-of-Mind of 3-6 Years Old Children [J]. Psychological Development and Education, 2002, 18(1): 11-15.
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