Bilateral (Hong Kong): Theory of mind development and use in children from Hong Kong and the UK - A latent variable study

获得一种心理理论（即，认识到人类行为是由信仰和欲望等心理状态控制的）使幼儿能够理解并参与各种复杂的社会互动，包括谎言、笑话和共同的假装游戏。多年来，是否拥有心智理论的试金石一直是在预测或解释错误信念的任务上取得成功。在西方，孩子们通常在3岁到5岁之间开始通过这些任务。这些发现令人担心，香港幼稚园对学术的高度重视可能会限制儿童的社会认知发展。然而，在为这种显著的跨文化差异寻求解释之前，至少需要解决两套方法论问题。首先，很少有研究使用仔细匹配的样本或应用统计测试来确定对比是否仅仅反映了不适当的翻译或不同的反应风格/社会规范。此外，这些研究很少包括对环境的直接测量（例如，父母的做法和期望），尽管需要这些来解释为什么存在群体对比。第二，新的任务范式表明，早在15到18个月大的时候，孩子们就会表现出观察和帮助的行为，这些行为似乎表明了错误信念意识，因此，在传统的错误信念任务上失败并不一定意味着对心灵的理解不足。迄今为止，这些新范式尚未用于直接的跨文化比较。此外，对成年人的研究表明，中国成年人实际上在“心智理论”技能的运用上表现得更出色，这表明在学龄前儿童身上观察到的任何文化差异都可能是发展特异性的。因此，迫切需要提高现有研究方法的严谨性，并把文化和发展的观点结合起来。本提案使用两个心理测量学研究来解决这两个挑战。研究1通过比较英国和香港10岁儿童的心智使用理论，扩展了这一研究领域的发展范围，使用了包括新开发的无声电影任务在内的任务组。研究1还包括一系列其他认知测试（例如，语言能力和执行功能测试）和多信息、多测量的社会能力评级。通过这种方式，研究1也将阐明大孩子对心理理解差异相关因素的文化普遍性/特异性。研究2也有两个目的。其中第一个是测试关于为什么儿童的自发行为（例如，看，帮助）在他们对传统的错误信念任务做出正确反应之前很久就表现出对心智的基本理解的竞争性理论。接下来，将对香港学龄前儿童（与他们的英国同龄人的年龄和语言能力相匹配）进行最稳健的范式研究，以调查儿童对心灵理解的文化差异的性质、程度和来源。这一合作项目有望取得丰硕成果，因为它汇集了不同专业领域的研究人员（例如，实验任务设计、认知评估、心理测量学）。此外，通过与香港教育学院的研究人员合作，申请人可以确保将与政策有关的研究结果有效地传播给香港的教育从业人员；与剑桥大学教育学院发展的积极关系将在英国产生类似的影响。

Acquiring a theory of mind (i.e., recognizing that human behaviour is governed by mental states such as beliefs and desires) enables young children to understand and engage in a wide range of sophisticated social interactions, including lies, jokes and shared pretend play. The litmus test for having a theory of mind has, for many years, been success on tasks involving predicting or explaining mistaken beliefs. In the West, children typically begin to pass such tasks between their 3rd and 5th birthdays. Yet findings from a recent meta-analysis suggest that Chinese preschoolers pass false belief tasks up to 2 years later, with children in Hong Kong performing even more poorly than their peers in mainland China. These findings have led to concerns that the intensely academic focus adopted by Hong Kong preschools may be constraining children's sociocognitive development. However, before seeking explanations for this striking cross-cultural contrast, at least two sets of methodological issues need to be addressed. First, very few studies have used carefully matched samples or applied statistical tests to establish whether contrasts simply reflect inappropriate translations or differing response styles / social norms. In addition, such studies rarely include direct measures of the environment (e.g., parental practices and expectations), even though these are needed to explain WHY there are group contrasts. Second, new task paradigms have shown that from as early as 15- to 18-months of age, children show looking and helping behaviours that appear to indicate false-belief awareness, such that failure on traditional false-belief tasks does not necessarily mean poor understanding of mind. To date, these novel paradigms have yet to be used in direct cross-cultural comparisons. Moreover, research with adults suggests that Chinese adults actually show superior use of 'theory of mind' skills, suggesting that any cultural contrasts observed in pre-schoolers are likely to be developmentally specific. There is, therefore, a pressing need both to increase the methodological rigour of existing research and to integrate cultural and developmental perspectives. This proposal uses two psychometric studies to address these twin challenges. Study 1 extends the developmental scope of this research field by comparing theory of mind use in 10-year-old children from the UK and Hong Kong, using a task battery that includes a newly developed silent film task. Study 1 also includes a battery of other cognitive tests (e.g., tests of language ability and executive function) and multi-informant, multi-measure ratings of social competence. In this way, Study 1 will also shed light on the cultural universality / specificity of the correlates of variation in older children's understanding of mind.Study 2 also has twin aims. The first of these is to test competing theoretical accounts of why children's spontaneous behaviours (e.g., looking, helping) appear to indicate a rudimentary understanding of mind long before they respond correctly to traditional false-belief tasks. Next, the most robust paradigms will be administered to pre-schoolers in Hong Kong (matched with their UK peers for age and verbal ability) to investigate the nature, magnitude and origins of cultural contrasts in children's understanding of mind. This collaborative venture promises to be fruitful as it brings together researchers with diverse areas of expertise (e.g., experimental task design, cognitive assessments, psychometrics). In addition, by partnering with researchers at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, the applicants are well placed to ensure that policy-relevant findings are disseminated efficiently to educational practitioners in Hong Kong; positive relations developed with the Faculty of Education in Cambridge will have a similar effectiveness of impact in the UK.