Relationship between talking about others while reminiscing and the emergence of theory of mind in Chinese preschoolers

To illustrate the relationship between the content of reminiscing and the ability of reasoning others' mental state, 74 children of 3-to 4-year-old were asked to talk about their experience and complete a set of theory of mind tasks. The results showed that compared to those of previous western researches, Chinese children mentioned little about emotion and mental state; children who mentioned larger number of other individuals in their autobiographical memory, showed better performance on theory of mind task, even when age and language ability were partial out. Chinese children are used to talk about past events in the interaction with others, and such reminiscing pattern may correlate to children's ability of reasoning about others' mental state. These results may suggest the impact of culture on autobiographical memory.EI06847-8544