Bianco Federica, Lecce Serena, Banerjee Robin
Department of Brain and Behavioural Science, Università of Pavia, 27100 Pavia, Italy.
Department of Brain and Behavioural Science, Università of Pavia, 27100 Pavia, Italy.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2016 Sep;149:41-61. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2015.11.006. Epub 2015 Dec 23.
Despite 30years of productive research on theory of mind (ToM), we still know relatively little about variables that influence ToM development during middle childhood. Recent experimental studies have shown that conversations about the mind affect ToM abilities, but they have not explored the mechanisms underlying this developmental effect. In the current study, we examined two potential mechanisms through which conversations about mental states are likely to influence ToM: an increased frequency of references to mental states when explaining behavior and an increased accuracy of mental-state attributions. To this aim, we conducted a training study in which 101 children were assigned to either an intervention condition or a control condition. The conversation-based intervention was made up of four sessions scheduled over 2weeks. Children completed a battery of assessments before and after the intervention as well as 2months later. The groups were equivalent at Time 1 (T1) for age, family affluence, vocabulary, and executive functions. The ToM group showed an improvement in ToM skills (as evaluated on both the practiced tasks and a transfer task). Mediation analyses demonstrated that the accuracy of mental-state attributions, but not the mere frequency of mental-state references, mediated the positive effect of conversations about the mind on ToM development. Our results indicate that conversational experience can enhance mental-state reasoning not by simply drawing children's attention to mental states but rather by scaffolding a mature understanding of social situations.
尽管在心理理论（ToM）方面进行了30年富有成效的研究，但我们对影响童年中期ToM发展的变量仍然知之甚少。最近的实验研究表明，关于心理的对话会影响ToM能力，但尚未探究这种发展效应背后的机制。在本研究中，我们考察了关于心理状态的对话可能影响ToM的两种潜在机制：解释行为时提及心理状态的频率增加以及心理状态归因的准确性提高。为此，我们进行了一项训练研究，将101名儿童分为干预组或对照组。基于对话的干预由在两周内安排的四个环节组成。儿童在干预前后以及两个月后完成了一系列评估。两组在时间1（T1）时在年龄、家庭富裕程度、词汇量和执行功能方面相当。ToM组在ToM技能方面有所提高（在练习任务和迁移任务上均有评估）。中介分析表明，心理状态归因的准确性而非仅仅提及心理状态的频率，介导了关于心理的对话对ToM发展的积极影响。我们的结果表明，对话经验可以增强心理状态推理，不是简单地将儿童的注意力吸引到心理状态上，而是通过搭建对社会情境的成熟理解来实现。
