Visual perspective-taking in young children: Reduction of egocentric errors by induction of strategy

Abstract

Children from 4 to 7 years of age were tested on two visual perspective-taking tasks. In one of these, they were asked to generate their own view of a toy house for a puppet “observer.” In the other task, a simple strategy was employed: respondents were asked first to generate their own view of the house for themselves, and then to generate that view for the observer. This strategy reduced the frequency of egocentric errors, to the degree that the performance of the 4-year-old children did not differ from that of the 7-year-olds. Results indicate that nonegocentric visual perspective-taking can be instantiated in young children without physical alteration of the task apparatus employed or of the child’s spatial relation to it. © 1987, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.