The "director" task: Which car do you mean?

In this study, we investigated whether performing opposite movements between the child and another person would highlight the differences between their visual perspectives and reduce 'egocentric errors'.

Children aged 3–6 years first participated in a game for a few minutes in which they made the opposite (inhibition group) or the same (imitation group) hand movements as an experimenter or the opposite of a video of a flower doll (non-social inhibition group).

A communicative game then followed, where the experimenter gave the children instructions about which objects should be moved in a bookcase. Some objects were hidden from the experimenter but not the children, so the children had to ignore these objects when choosing the correct toy.

Our results show that in the inhibition group, children chose the correct object (from the experimenter's perspective) more often (2.4 out of 4 times on average) than the imitation group (1.5 out of 4 times). This suggests that highlighting the differences between the self-other perspective helps children consider the unique perspective of the other. There was no improvement in the non-social inhibition group, showing that the results are specific to doing the opposite of another person and not general response inhibition. Additionally, there was also an overall improvement with age between 3-6 years, showing that this age is important for children to become effective communicators.

Find more information about our results in our publication Training self-other distinction facilitates perspective taking in young children.