The Early Development of Inferences about the Visual Percepts of Others

MASANGKAY, ZENAIDA S.; McCLUSKEY, KATHLEEN A.; MCINTYRE, CURTIS W.; SIMS-KNIGHT, JUDITH; VAUGHN, BRIAN E.; and FLAVELL, JOHN H. The Early Development of Inferences about the Visual Percepts of Others. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1974, 45, 357-366. 3 experiments assessed the ability of 2-5-year-old children to infer, under very simple task conditions, what another person sees when viewing something from a position other than the children's own. Some ability of this genre appears to exist by 2-3 years of age, at least. The data suggest a distinction between an earlier (Level 1) and a later (Level 2) developmental form of visual percept inference. At Level 1, S is capable of nonegocentrically inferring that O sees an object presently nonvisible to S himself. At Level 2, S is also capable of nonegocentrically inferring how an object that both currently see appears to O, that is, how it looks from his particular spatial perspective.

The Early Development of Inferences about the Visual Percepts of Others | Litlas