The article considers the mutual relations of theory of mind (ToM), behavioural control and verbal mental age. It describes the development of ToM and behavioural control in preschool children.Behavioural control is assessed by the Day-Night task, the Test of Child Anxiety by Tamml, Dorky and Aman and a series of neuropsychological tasks. ToM is assessed by the following tasks: visual perspective understanding tasks, the task for the understanding of desires, the task for the understanding of "seeing leads to knowing", the first-order false belief task and the understanding of false belief in stories task.Verbal mental age is assessed by the subtest "Vocabulary" of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-III. One hundred and seventeen children at the age of three, four and five years old (36-72 months old, 48 males) have participated in the study. The results of typically developing children and children with low verbal mental age are compared. The children with low and normal mental age at the age of three differ in behavioural control, and at the age of three and four they differ in ToM. The role of verbal mental age in the development of theory of mind and behavioural control at the age of 3-4 years old is more significant than at the age of 5. At that age, these abilities do not correlate with the verbal mental age.

The actual problem of interdisciplinary projects organizing is discussed. The purpose of the article is to justify the principles of planning and conducting the interdisciplinary medico-psychological research, in identifying its features in comparison with pseudo-interdisciplinary approaches. Types of interdisciplinary research are examined, distinctions are made between the true and pseudo-interdisciplinary approaches. The principles of true interdisciplinary research are formulated — the principle of choosing the object of study, the principle of determining the coordinates of the subject area of research, the hypothetico-deductive principle of interdisciplinary research and the principle of unity of interdisciplinary project methodology. The content of each principle is revealed by the example of medico-psychological research currently being carried out by the team of employees of the Institute of Psychology RAS and the National Medical Research Center of Traumatology and Orthopedics named after N.N. Priorov. It is shown that the system-structural approach to conducting the interdisciplinary medico-psychological research consists in coordinating theoretical constructs and empirical variables in accordance with the given coordinates of the research subject field and specific criteria for assessing the physical and mental state of the object of study. It is shown that the selected criteria allow, without leveling the specifics of individual scientific disciplines — medicine and psychology — to form a unified subject field of research and to develop an approach relevant for solving scientific and practical problems.

Studying behavior control as a regulatory function of a subject, we found that among typically developing primary schoolchildren there are certain types of children whose behavior control is organized differently (with an emphasis on the cognitive or emotional component) (Vilenskaya 2017). Children differed in the flexibility of attention and the effectiveness of its distribution. Adaptation to school and the success of learning largely depends on behavior regulation. This was the reason why we decided to check whether a similar typology is applicable to children with disabilities. The study involved 25 first-graders with disabilities. Children were divided into groups according to the median criterion: flexible-rigid and successful-unsuccessful in distributing attention. The children of these groups did not differ by the level of adaptation to school, intelligence and behavior control. However, they showed different patterns of correlation between behavior control and indicators of adaptation to school. In "flexible" children, only adaptation to the program and adaptation in behavior are associated with behavior control. They also have non-verbal intelligence associated with adaptation to the program. In "rigid" children, almost all aspects of adaptation (except for adaptation in behavior) are associated with control of behavior, at the same time, adaptation in them is not associated with non-verbal intelligence. In children with varying success in the distribution of attention, intelligence and behavior control serve as resources for various aspects of adaptation, and children who successfully distribute attention have more diverse adaptation resources than children who find it difficult to do so. Children with disabilities with different individual characteristics use various resources for adaptation, which must be taken into account by teachers and psychologists when working with them.

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