Seeing it both ways: examining the role of inhibitory control in level-2 visual perspective-taking

Abstract

Level-2 visual perspective taking (VPT) refers to the ability to understand that other people may see objects differently. Using the number verification task, previous studies have found egocentric and altercentric biases in level-2 VPT. However, the cognitive mechanism of these biases is still unclear. Thus, the present study used the adapted negative priming (NP) paradigm to investigate the role of inhibitory control in overcoming these biases in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we found egocentric bias and observed the NP effect for children and adults. However, there was no significant difference between children and adults in the magnitude of the NP effect, indicating that when children can overcome the egocentric bias in the level-2 VPT, their inhibitory control ability is comparable to that of adults. In Experiment 2, altercentric bias was confirmed in children and adults. However, we did not observe the NP effect in children. These results suggest that children may not have sufficient cognitive capacity to suppress others’ perspectives, or may not experience interference by others’ perspectives and thus have no need to inhibit.