One important distinction in understanding the development of perspective taking was proposed by Flavell et al. This work inspired hundreds of studies, many of which focused on demonstrating success earlier than 9 or 10 years (see review by Newcombe, 1989). Piaget and Inhelder argued that young children were unable to coordinate multiple perspectives and they interpreted these difficulties as being indicative of a lack of understanding of what they called projective space. Up to the age of 9 or 10 years, children made many errors on this task and often picked their own view instead of the observer’s view, thus committing egocentric errors. In their Three Mountains Task, Piaget and Inhelder asked children to look at a model display of three mountains and to indicate how an observer would see this layout from another position. Visual perspective taking, or the ability to mentally represent a viewpoint different from one’s own, has been extensively studied in the developmental literature, beginning with Piaget and Inhelder’s (1956) seminal work on The child’s conception of space.
This perspective taking task can thus be used to address important questions about the supports for early spatial development and the structure of early intellect. Results showed that this new technique confirmed the classic pattern of developmental progress on this kind of spatial skill: (1) 4-year-olds responded near chance level, regardless of layout complexity, (2) there was a growing ability to inhibit egocentric choices around age 6 with layouts of low complexity (one object), (3) performance increased and egocentric responses decreased dramatically around age 7, (4) even at age 8, children still showed considerable individual variability. Children were asked to choose which one of four pictures could have been taken from a specific viewpoint.
To address this gap, we created scenes of toy photographers taking pictures of layouts of objects from different angles, and presented them to 4- to 8-year-olds ( N = 80). Although the development of perspective taking has been well researched, there is no uniform methodology for assessing this ability across a wide age span when frames of reference conflict.
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