Joseph R M
Psychological Sciences Division, Shriver Center, Waltham, MA 02154, USA.
Child Dev. 1998 Aug;69(4):966-80; discussion 994-5.
Experiments 1 and 2 investigated 3- and 4-year-olds' understanding of the intended nature of pretend behaviors by testing their ability to distinguish between involuntary behaviors and the same behaviors emitted intentionally through acts of pretend. Four-year-olds' high rate of passing showed that (1) they understood intention as a mental cause of action and (2) they construed pretend behaviors mentalistically. Experiment 3 used the same contrastive procedure to examine Lillard's contention that 4-year-olds do not understand the knowledge conditions and hence the mental representational component of pretend actions. Whereas nearly all of the 5-year-olds understood that an agent who did not know of a specific animal could not be pretending to be that animal, 4-year-olds systematically associated ignorance with pretend. On the basis of the combined findings of the present experiments, and other research showing a mentalistic understanding of pretense by the age of 3 or 4, it was concluded that the specific reasoning requirements of Lillard's tasks resulted in an underestimation of children's appreciation of the mental features of pretend.
实验1和实验2通过测试3岁和4岁儿童区分非自愿行为与通过假装行为故意做出的相同行为的能力，研究了他们对假装行为意图本质的理解。4岁儿童的高通过率表明：（1）他们将意图理解为行为的心理原因；（2）他们从心理层面理解假装行为。实验3采用相同的对比程序，检验了利拉德的观点，即4岁儿童不理解知识条件，因此也不理解假装行为的心理表征成分。几乎所有5岁儿童都明白，一个不知道某种特定动物的主体不可能假装成那种动物，而4岁儿童却系统性地将无知与假装联系起来。基于本实验的综合研究结果，以及其他表明3岁或4岁儿童对假装具有心理主义理解的研究，得出的结论是，利拉德任务的特定推理要求导致低估了儿童对假装心理特征的理解。
