The present study evaluated the effects of stimulus complexity and rule usage on a visual perspective-taking task. Preschoolers, first, third, and fifth graders, and adults were shown arrays of dolls and performed a series of perspective-taking tasks. Errors decreased with age, and more errors occurred with the more complex visual arrays. A significant number of errors were made in self-view tr...

Spatial perspective taking is the ability to reason about spatial relations relative to another's viewpoint. Here, we propose a mechanistic hypothesis that relates mental representations of one's viewpoint to the transformations used for spatial perspective taking. We test this hypothesis using a novel behavioral paradigm that assays patterns of response time and variation in those patterns acr...

The authors propose that people adopt others' perspectives by serially adjusting from their own. As predicted, estimates of others' perceptions were consistent with one's own but differed in a manner consistent with serial adjustment (Study 1). Participants were slower to indicate that another's perception would be different from--rather than similar to--their own (Study 2). Egocentric biases i...

This study analyzes the extent to which students using web-based discussion boards show an increase in perspective-taking in structured and unstructured discussions. Messages from fifty-six students enrolled in one of two courses were content analyzed using Jarvela and Hakkinen’s (2003) expansion of Selman’s (1980) perspective-taking coding scheme. There was a significant difference in the leve...