Egocentrism and Automatic Perspective Taking in Children and Adults

Children (aged 610) 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 persons 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 ones own perspective when it differed from that of the other person, suggesting that the others 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.