不意移動ストーリーの読みなおしによる幼児の誤信念理解の促進 : ワーキングメモリとの関連から

Abstract

This study examines the effect of young child's narrations of the story in the standard false-belief task. We also examined the relationship between the children's performance of their recall of the false-belief story and those of the working memory tasks. If repetition of narration of a false-belief story can reduce the load of working memory, young children will be able to answer the protagonist's behavior more correctly than in the standard false-belief task. Three- to 5-year-old Japanese preschoolers were given a standard false-belief task, a book task, a receptive vocabulary task, and two working memory tasks. In the book task, they were asked to narrate the false-belief story back to the experimenter before the prediction question was asked. The performance of the book task was higher than that of the false-belief task. According to the results of partial correlation in which age and vocabulary factors were controlled, the performance of working memory task significantly related to children's recall of key information of the story in the narration phase. These findings show that better working memory enables children to activate the key information of the false-belief story, and this information then enables them to correctly predict another's behavior.