Egocentrism and Automatic Perspective Taking in Children and Adults

Children (aged 6-10) and adults (total N = 136) completed a novel visual perspective-taking task that allowed quantitative comparisons across age groups. All age groups found it harder to judge the other person's perspective when it differed from their own. This egocentric interference did not...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Child development 2012-03, Vol.83 (2), p.452-460
Main Authors: Surtees, Andrew D. R., Apperly, Ian A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adults
Age
Age Differences
Age Factors
Age groups
Automatism - psychology
Avatars
Biological and medical sciences
Cartoons
Child
Child development
Child psychology
Children
Cognitive ability
Cognitive Processes
Cues
Defense Mechanisms
Depth Perception
Developmental psychology
Discrimination Learning
Egocentrism
EMPIRICAL REPORTS
Experimentation
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Infancy
Infants
Interference
Judgment
Judgments
Male
Mind
Observational research
Orientation
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Perception
Perceptions
Perspective Taking
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reaction Time
Self Concept
Statistical Analysis
Task Analysis
Theory of Mind
Visual Stimuli
Young Adult
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Description
Summary:Children (aged 6-10) and adults (total N = 136) completed a novel visual perspective-taking task that allowed quantitative comparisons across age groups. All age groups found it harder to judge the other person's perspective when it differed from their own. This egocentric interference did not decrease with age, even though, overall, performance improved. In addition, it was more difficult to judge one's own perspective when it differed from that of the other person, suggesting that the other's perspective was processed even though it interfered with self-perspective judgments. In a logically equivalent, nonsocial task, the same degree of interference was not observed. These findings are discussed in relation to recent findings suggesting precocious theory-of-mind abilities in infancy.
ISSN:0009-3920
1467-8624
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01730.x