To determine whether the growing ability to take a third-person perspective (3PP) is explained in part by the growing ability to inhibit a first-person perspective (1PP), 10-year-old children (n = 49) and 22-year-old adults (n = 52) performed a negative priming adaptation of the own body transformation task. Both children and adults were less…

Three experiments investigated 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' (N = 240) understanding that their future or "grown-up" preferences may differ from their current ones (self-future condition). This understanding was compared to children's understanding of the preferences of a grown-up (adult-now condition) or the grown-up preferences of…

Four- to 10-year-olds' and adults' (N = 263) ability to inhibit privileged knowledge and simulate a naïve perspective were examined. Participants viewed pictures that were then occluded aside from a small ambiguous part. They offered suggestions for how a naïve person might interpret the hidden pictures, as well as rated the probability…

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…

Classic theories of self-development suggest people define themselves in part through internalized perceptions of other people's beliefs about them, known as reflected self-appraisals. This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural correlates of direct and reflected self-appraisals in adolescence (N = 12, ages 11-14…

Children aged two and one-half to five years gave moral evaluations, attributions of parental affect, and personal liking evaluations of both standard (motive and outcome) moral episodes and simplified (motive only) episodes. (JMB)

Studies investigated the development of children's ability to differentiate what they see from what they know in the context of conceptual perspective taking. Two developmental levels accounted for children's performance when they were asked about a naive observer's knowledge of the identity of objects. Perspective awareness training improved…

Children, ages three, five, and seven, were asked to evaluate a series of children's drawings for their own likes and dislikes and for the likes and dislikes they imagined for individuals older and younger than themselves. Results suggest that children as young as three can judge drawings for others differently from the way they judge them for…

Twenty-two subjects (school-age children, their younger siblings, and their best friends) were observed in their homes while playing a popular board game. Five roles were operationalized and observed: teacher, learner, manager, managee, and playmate. (Author/RH)

A total of 120 children between four to eight years of age were administered four sets of visual perspective-taking tasks. Results supported the hypothesis that children's task competence would be a fraction of the number and type of spatial relationships embedded in the stimulus displays. (Author/MP)

Assesses whether a model of at least two levels of perspective-taking ability beyond egocentrism provides a more adequate account of the variance in subjects' responses across perspective-taking tasks. (Author/MP)

The study focused on the question of whether the use of general persuasive strategies reflecting progressively higher levels of perspective-taking ability increases with age. (SB)

In one experiment, infants and children were accurate in their judgments about the knowledge of a baby, child, and adult. In two further experiments, children reported that an infant, child, or adult observer would be able to identify an object from an identifiable or nondescript part of the object. (BC)

Acquiring the norm of altruism is conceived as a three-step process involving presocialization, awareness that others value altruistic behavior, and internalization of the norm. The present studies investigated how first-, second-, and third-grade children attain the second step. Attainment, occurring around second grade, was a function of…