◎ 邓赐平

　　关于心理状态的认识－－即所谓的直觉的"心理理论(Theory of mind, ToM)"，是人类最基本的认识领域之一。从发展的角度探究儿童如何获得心理理论，是当前发展心理学的研究热点之一。二十世纪九十年代以来，ToM研究出现了新的发展倾向，开始致力于揭示这种认识的发展进程和机制。其中，最重要的研究路线之一就是探究ToM发展的一般认识前提（即心理理论的一般表征机制问题）及早期经验的影响作用问题。
我们认为，ToM的发展既离不开一般的认知发展基础，又受儿童日常生活情境特殊性的影响。因此本研究强调以认知发展的一般趋势和领域特殊性相统一的观点为指导，探究幼儿ToM的表征机制及其发展问题。特别是由于程式知识(script knowledge)和假装游戏在幼儿早期社会生活和表征能力发展中的重要作用，我们尤其关注程式知识和假装游戏在幼儿ToM发展过程中的作用。具体地说，本研究以三、四和五岁幼儿为研究对象，进行了八个实验，深入考察幼儿ToM的一般发展特点，以及任务情境、任务内容、社会经验知识及假装（想象）对ToM发展的影响。
与以往侧重于ToM一般发展趋势的诸多研究不同，本研究力图在研究的指导思想、研究方法和研究内容上均有新发展（或创新）：首先在指导思想上，特别强调认知发展的一般趋势与领域特殊性的统一，因此在关注ToM一般发展趋势的同时，关注发展的个别差异；其次，采用了多重检测方法，并在评估过程中对幼儿尽可能显得"友好"，以提高早期能力评估方法的敏感性；在研究内容方面，本研究考查了一些以往所不曾研究过的领域，例如儿童早期的程式知识与ToM之间的发展关系问题、假装到表征性ToM的发展路径等。源于此，本研究得到了一些重要结果，证实了我们的一些具有重要理论意义的研究假设；特别是关于儿童早期社会经验和假装游戏与ToM之间发展关系的研究，不仅有助于进一步深入探究儿童心理理论的发生和发展规律，而且对教育实践（特别是早期教育）具有启示意义。
研究的第一部分由三个实验构成，即实验一"不同ToM任务表现的一致性及其认知基础"、实验二"任务情境对幼儿ToM能力表现的影响"和实验三"外表－事实的区分：不同任务变式的差异比较"，旨在探究ToM的一般认知基础问题，特别对ToM发展的领域一般性和领域特殊性问题进行探讨。结果与以往的不少研究一致，表明3岁儿童似乎普遍缺乏ToM能力，只有到4岁左右儿童才开始表现出ToM能力；而且儿童在不同ToM任务上的表现普遍存在显著相关，四类任务在主成分分析中的第一个主成分上均有较大的负荷，这表明儿童在各ToM任务上的表现，总体上存在某种潜在一致性，这种内在一致性或许正反映了儿童在不同ToM任务上的表现中存在的某种公共的底层能力。另一方面，幼儿在不同ToM任务上的表现中存在较大的发展差异，他们的表现随任务情境（和内容）的变化而变化，即他们的表现似乎具有任务特殊性。这表明尽管幼儿ToM的发展可能基于一般的认知（表征）基础，但他们的能力表现模式往往随任务情境（如实验二结果所示）和任务内容（如实验三结果所示）的变化而变化。这种表现模式证实，ToM的发展体现了一般发展趋势和领域特殊性的统一。
研究的第二部分由五个实验构成（实验四--实验八），主要探究早期经验对ToM发展的影响及影响路径问题。实验四旨在探讨幼儿早期社会经验发展的个别差异及其与ToM
发展的关系，特别是考查程式知识和假装经验对ToM发展的影响问题。结果表明，幼儿的程式知识对他们关于错误信念的认识、对假装－事实的区分和对假装者信念的推测有显著影响，并且这种影响独立于年龄因素的影响。但对幼儿关于外表－事实的区分影响并不显著。这表明，社会经验知识对幼儿关于心理状态的认识发展可能具有某种特异性的影响，尽管其作用方式尚有待进一步探究。
实验五和实验六旨在考查假装情境及假装经验在ToM发展中的作用。结果发现，幼儿关于假装的认识早于对信念的认识，但是与以往的一些研究不同，我们发现即使在假装情境中，幼儿对错误信念的认识与他们在标准的错误信念任务上表现并无显著差异，这表明仅仅是假装情境并不能促进幼儿对信念的认识。但进一步对幼儿进行关于假装记忆的训练，促进了他们在随后的关于信念认识任务上的表现，这一结果支持了认为儿童朴素心理学具有直觉的理论性特征的论点，似乎也支持了假装认识在ToM发展中可能具有重要作用的假设。
实验七和实验八考查了幼儿对想象的认识，并进一步探究了从假装到ToM的一条可能的发展路径，即关于想象的认识可能是从假装发展到表征性心理理论的桥梁。结果表明，即使排除了行为成分，幼儿对想象的认识仍早于他们关于信念的认识；并且关于想象的表征性的认识训练，促进了幼儿关于信念的表征性的认识。这说明在幼儿能够认识到信念的表征性（一般认为这是儿童形成心理表征理论－RToM的重要标志）之前，幼儿已经对一些虚构的心理状态的表征性有所认识，并且这种认识能够促进关于诸如信念这种旨在如实表征事实的心理状态的认识。
基于上述研究结果，我们得出两个基本结论：
其一，一般表征能力的发展的确可能是构成心理理论计算(computation)的基础，但这种关于心理理论发展的元表征发展模型只反映了幼儿心理理论发展的一般倾向，而难以解释幼儿心理理论发展中的个别差异以及幼儿在ToM任务中的表现所具有的任务情境的特殊性。因此今后的研究应进一步关注一般认知基础与领域特殊性之间的交互作用问题。
其二，在早期假装游戏中，幼儿的确可能在很大程度上基于行为成分来认识假装，但他们可能在参与假装游戏的过程中，逐渐认识到假装的想象成分所具有的表征性，这种认识在不断被抽象化和合理化的过程中，逐渐发展成为某种稳固的表征性认识，并被迁移到其它的心理状态认识中。因此，通过进行假装游戏，并在假装中逐渐形成关于想象表征性的认识，最终发展到关于其它心理状态的表征性认识，或许是重要的ToM发展路径之一。

　

◎ Ci-ping DENG

　　Understanding of mental states--e.g. the intuitive theory of mind (ToM), is a core domain of human's foundation knowledge. Theory-of-mind research is one of the hottest, most active research areas in developmental psychology. Since 90s last century, there has been a new tendency in ToM research, in which most researchers begin to explore the developmental course and mechanism of the understanding. One of the most important research lines is to explore the general representational mechanism of ToM and the influence of early experience on ToM development.
In our opinion, the development of ToM not only depends on general cognitive foundations, but also is influenced by children's particular daily social context. Thus, in our study on development and representational mechanism of young children's ToM, we took the integration of domain-general trend and domain-specificity of ToM development as the guideline. Owing to the important implications of script knowledge and pretend play on young children's early social lives and the development of representational ability, it is reasonable for us to pay special attention to the influence of script knowledge and pretend play on the development of young children's ToM. In specific, we chose 3 to 5-year-olds as our study subjects, and carried on 8 experiments to examine the developmental features of young children's ToM, and the influence of task contexts, task materials, early social knowledge and pretense on development of ToM.
Different from previous studies, the study brought forth some new ideas on various aspects: firstly, directed by the idea of integration of domain-generality and domain-specificity, the study attended not only to general trends but also to individual developmental difference of ToM development. The second, in order to improve the sensitivity of the assessment about young children's early competence, we adopted multiple methods to detect young children's early competence and tried our best to be friendly to our young subjects in our assessment. The third, we have explored some new research areas, such as the developmental relationship between script knowledge and ToM, the developmental path from pretend play to representational theories of mind. Owing to these creative workings, some important results were achieved and some theoretic assumptions were confirmed in the study. The results, especially the findings achieved in the study on developmental relationship between early social experience (including pretense experience) and ToM, will not only be conducive to revealing the developmental mechanism of ToM, but also provide great enlightenment for early educational practice.
The first three experiments constituted the first part of the study, which focused on the general cognitive foundations of ToM. The question about the domain-specificity and the domain-generalization of
ToM development has also been discussed in this part. Consistent with many previous findings, the results of these experiments showed that 3-year-olds generally lacked ToM ability, whereas 4-year-olds began to show the ToM ability. Furthermore, young children's performances on various ToM tasks correlated to each other, and in the principal analysis, all four tasks have significant loading on the first principle component. The results showed that there may be some potential coherence among children's performance on those four tasks, which might suggest that there be some common substrate underlying young children's performance on various ToM tasks. On the other hand, there was great difference between young children's performance on various ToM tasks, i.e. their performance showed to be task-specific. These findings suggested that although the development of young children's ToM is based on some general cognitive (representational) foundations, its performance varies with task contexts (as experiment 2 showed) and task materials (as experiment 3 showed). The performance pattern confirmed the idea that the development course of ToM not only fitted to some domain-general mechanism, but also followed some domain-specific principles.
The other five experiments constituted the second part of the study, which mainly explored the influence of early experience on ToM development and the influential path. In the experiment 4, we focused on the influence of early social experience on the development of ToM, especially the influence of script knowledge and pretense experience. The results showed that script knowledge had significant effect on young children's performance on false-belief understanding task, pretense-reality distinction task and inference of pretender's belief, which was independent of age effect. However, its effect on appearance-reality distinction was not significant. The finding suggested that we should pay more attention to the possible implication of early social experience for the development of ToM.
In experiment 5 and experiment 6, we aimed at examining the possible effect of pretense context and pretense experience on the ToM development. Results revealed that young children's understanding of pretense preceded their understanding of belief. However, inconsistent with some previous findings, we didn't find any facilitating effect of pretense context on young children's understanding of belief in experiment 5. Even more importantly, we found that the training on young children's memory of pretense enhanced their performance on belief-understanding tasks. The latter finding not only supported the idea about the theory nature of children's folk psychology, but also held out another assumption that the understanding of pretense might play an important role in the development of ToM.
In experiment 7 and experiment 8, we examined young children's understanding of imagination, and investigated the possible developmental route from pretense to ToM -- maybe the understanding of imagination paves the way for the development from pretense to representational theories of mind. The results revealed that, even if the behavioral components were controlled, young children's' understanding of imagination still preceded their understanding of belief. Moreover, the training on representational understanding of imagination enhanced young children's representational understanding of belief. The findings suggested that before young children realize the representational nature of belief, they have gained some understanding about the representational nature of the fictional mental states, which might enhance their understanding about other mental states purporting to represent reality truthfully, such as belief.
Based on those findings, we concluded that:
First, maybe theory-of-mind computations depend on the general representational development, but the shortcomings of the representational model on ToM development that only focuses on general tendency of ToM development are also obvious, for it neglects the developmental difference and context (or content) specificity of ToM. It points to the importance of paying more attention to the interaction between general cognitive bases and domain specificity in the development of ToM.
Second, although in the early pretend play, young children may largely understand pretense in term of behavioral components, they can gradually realize the representational nature of imagination components of pretense through attending pretend play. This kind of understanding is in turn consolidated and transferred to other mental states during being abstracted and rationalized. So, maybe attending pretend play is an important route in ToM development. By pretend play, young children would gradually acquire some understanding about the representational nature of imagination, which eventually would transfer to that of other mental states.

　　作者简介：邓赐平，1970年生，男，华东师范大学2001届博士研究生，师从缪小春教授，主要从事儿童认知发展研究。现在华东师范大学心理学系工作。

（责任编辑：韩春红）