3-7岁儿童对情景化习俗道义情境中社会行为的认知发展

Children’s understanding of deontic rules and theory of mind (ToM) were the two research domains for children’s social cognition. It was significant for understanding children’s social cognition to combine the researches in the two domains. Children at 3, 5 and 7years were required to answer three questions according to the stories which happened in children’s familiar context. The three questions were designed to address the three problems:⑴Development of 3-7-Year-old children’s understanding about how the deontic rules were enacted or changed.⑵ Development of 3-7-Year-old children’s understanding about that the deontic rules and the actor’s mental states could impact on his behaviors.⑶ Development of 3-7-Year-old children’s capacity to integrate the deontic rules and mental state to evaluate the actor’s behavior. The results showed that: ① The 3-7-Year-old children had known that deontic rules were established by the authority’s speech act. But there were still some irrelevant factors which influenced the children’s judgments, such as the authority’s desire. ② The children gradually recognized the relationship between actors should do something and they will do the same thing. 3-year-old children could recognize such relationship in a way, but their predictions were usually influenced by some irrelevant factors. The children at 5 and 7 years old understood this relationship more steady. ③ In deontic context, more and more children predicted the actors’ behaviors according to the actors’ mental states as they grown up. The ratio that the 3-7-Year-old children predicted the actors’ behavior according to their false belief about the deontic rules was smaller in deontic context compared with the children’s performance in traditional false belief task. This maybe indicated that the deontic context influenced the children’s inference stronger than the physical context. ④ When they could get the actors’ desires and the deontic rules, all the children could predict the actors’ behaviors according to their desires, but not the deontic rules. It meant that all the children could understand that the actors’ desire mediated between the deontic rules and their behaviors. But when the actors wanted to transgress the deontic rules, all the children’s predications became less accurate. ⑤ When they assigned criticism, more and more children could discriminate different behaviors as a result of diverse mental states although they all transgressed the deontic rules. But the most part of children overweighed the deontic rules but overlooked the actors’ mental state about the deontic rules; their criticism to behaviors which transgressed the deontic rules just differ in quantity according to diverse mental states, that is: if the actors known the rules or want to transgress the rules, then punished more, and if the actors didn’t know the rules or transgress the rules accidentally, then punished a little.

7-12岁儿童执行功能与智力的关系

The nature of individual differences among children is an important issue in the study of human intelligence. There are close relation between intelligence and executive functions. Traditional theories, which are based mainly on the factor analysis, approach the problem only from the perspective of psychometrics. However, they do not study the relation of cognition and neurobiology. Some researchers try to explore the essential differences in intelligence from the basic cognitive level, by studying the relationship between executive function and intelligence. The aim of this study was to do the followings 1) to delineate and separate the executive function in children into measurable constructs; 2) to establish the relationship between executive function and intelligence in children; 3) to find out the difference and its neural mechanism between intellectually-gifted and normal children’s executive function. The participants were 188 children aged 7-12 year old. There were 6 executive function tasks. The results were follows: 1) The latent variables analyses showed that there was no stable construct of executive function in 7-10 year old children. The executive function construct of 11-12 year old children could be separated into updating, inhibition and shifting. And they had grown to be more or less the same as adults in the executive function. There were only moderate correlations between the three types of executive function, but they were largely independent of each other. 2) The correlations between the indices of updating, inhibition, shifting and intelligence were different in 7-12 year old children. The older the age, the more the indices were related to intelligence. The updating and shifting were related to intelligence in 7-10 year old children. There were significant correlations between the updating, inhibition, shifting and intelligence in 11-12 year old children. The correlation between updating and intelligence was higher than the correlation between shifting and intelligence. Furthermore, in structural equation models controlling for the three executive functions correlations, updating was highly related to intelligence, but the relations of inhibition and shifting to intelligence were not significant. 3) Intellectually-gifted children performed better than normal children in executive function tasks. The neural mechanism differences between intellectually gifted and average children were indicated by ERP component P3. The present study helps us to understand the relationship between intelligence and executive function; and throws light on the issue of individual differences in intelligence. The present results can provide theoretical support for the development a culture-free intelligence test and a method to promote the development of intelligence. Our present study lends support to the neural efficient hypothesis.