MENTAL MODEL AND ABILITY TO ATTEND COLLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY IN PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

The article analyzes the relationship of the child's understanding of states, desires, intentions of the other (“mental model”) and the ability to adhere to collective intentionality in a situation of moral choice. To achieve the goal on a sample of children of preschool age, classical methods were applied to assess the level of the mental model and experimental conditions were created to study the child's communication skills in a moral choice situation. А number of diagnostic series were proposed to study the observance of norms of justice, the study of the effectiveness of public and personal motive. In the created experimental situations it was confirmed that the level of development of the mental model in preschoolers mediates the strategy of interaction with partners in a situation of moral choice. It is shown that the mental model helps the child to flexibly apply normative judgments about the rationality of communicative acts in a situation of moral choice. These studies reflect the role of the development of the ”model of mental” in a Child in the ability to build collective intentionality, choose the priority of a joint goal, joint intentions, as well as the existence of specific motives for helping and sharing with other people At the same time, the formed ideas about the mental world of others do not imply a coincidence of intentions and the absence of a preference for one's own advantage in a situation of moral choice. The results of this study show the capabilities of the mental model for the interpretation of social interactions. It is especially important to consider this issue іп ontogeny in order to understand the development of a child's social skills, socially significant norms and values with which the strategy of interaction between preschool children and peers in the process of joint activity correlates.