研究选择90名3-5岁幼儿为被试,采用熟悉和不熟悉两种材料来测验幼儿在外表-事实区分任务和错误信念任务上的表现。结果表明幼儿的心理理论水平随年龄增长在3-5岁之间存在明显的发展变化。材料熟悉度和任务类型对幼儿心理理论水平的发展有影响。这些结果说明表征不可通达假设的观点似乎要优于表征缺失理论。
Ninety 3-5-year-old Chinese children's understanding of appearance-reality distinction and false belief was examined in a series of tasks with two types of materials, familiar and unfamiliar. It was found that young children's level of theory-of-mind had an obvious development between three and five. Young children's performances of theory-of-mind were influenced by the degrees of familiarity of materials and the types of tasks. These results more favored the representation-not-attached hypothesis than the representation-deficit hypothesis.