Development Of Mind And Behavioural Control In Preschoolers With Different Mental Age

Abstract

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.

Untitled

“…The small size of our sample can limit our conclusions. However, in our previous study (Vilenskaya & Lebedeva, 2014) we found links between behavioral control and ToM in preschoolers in a sample of similar size. It is possible that in school age children the links between behavioral control and ToM are weaker and a small sample size is not enough for revealing these links.…”

“…An alternative explanation is that the differentiation of behavioral control and ToM functions takes place at primary school age. If in early childhood these two functions determined each other (as shown by our data from 3 to 5-year-old children in Vilenskaya & Lebedeva, 2014), then along with growing up these abilities become independent from each other, and their dynamics of development also differ. In general, ToM forms up to the age of 6 -7 years ; our data support this point of view), when self-regulation (behavioral control) continues to develop intensively .…”