Perspective-Taking

How do children think about other people’s points of view?

It can be tricky to consider the world from someone else’s perspective. If someone can’t see something you can see, how do you think about their view? In this study, we tested which skills help 3-year-olds think about what other people can and cannot see. We found that it was easier for children to think about what someone else can see than what they cannot see. Children also understood what another person saw, but they struggled to act on that understanding during an interaction. We also found that children who were more “in tune” with other people were a bit better at thinking about their perspectives.

Publication:
Brezack, N., Meyer, M., & Woodward, A. (2021). Three-year-olds’ perspective-taking in social interactions: Relations with socio-cognitive skills. Journal of Cognition and Development, DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2021.1901713

What is the neural basis of perspective-taking?

To further understand how children consider the world from another person’s point of view, we explored the neural correlates of perspective-taking in 4-year-olds using EEG. This safe, non-invasive technique allows us to passively record brain activity while children play a perspective-taking game. We found that by age 4, children were better at considering another person’s perspective than they were at age 3. We also found some specific brain areas that were associated with perspective-taking: Preliminary results showed that a particular frequency called “theta” in a region of the brain near the “right tempo-parietal area” might be involved in thinking about someone else’s perspective.

Publication:
Meyer, M., Brezack, N., & Woodward, A. (in prep). Neural correlates of perspective-taking in 4-year-olds.