"Own View" versus "Good View" in a Perspective-Taking Task

Abstract

Children who fail spatial perspective-taking tasks of the "3 mountains" variety apparently preferentially select pictures showing their own view. It has been suggested that this might arise, at least in part, because children in such tasks have been given particularly good views of the arrays. To test this, an experiment was conducted with 40 4-6-year-olds in which children were tested from both "good" and "poor" viewing positions. As hypothesized, children did not show any bias toward their own view when it was a poor one. However, when they themselves had a good view of the objects, they chose their own rather than another equally good view. Thus, 2 selection principles appear to operate hierarchically, selection of good view having priority over selection of own view.

Are young children’s drawings canonically biased?

“…There was indeed a preference for mentally representing the handle at the top when it was known to be at the back and for mentally representing the handle at the bottom when it was known to be at the front. In accordance with Light and Nix (1983), we suggest that most of the visually unrealistic drawings produced by the young children reflect biases toward best views rather than own views of objects.…”

“…When the mental model refers to a rigid canonical representation of the object, knowledge can intrude in the depiction process and provoke drawing errors of a canonical type. However, and as our results revealed, rigidity did not last for a long period of time, and a minimal level of representational flexibility existed, such that errors in drawing behavior reflected, for the most part, biases toward a best view of the proposed object (Light & Nix, 1983). The literature on the development of flexibility in childrenÕs drawings produced under innovation requirements (e.g., drawing nonexistent objects) offers similar conclusions in this regard (e.g., Karmiloff-Smith, 1990;Picard & Vinter, 1999).…”

God's Beliefs versus Mother's: The Development of Nonhuman Agent Concepts

“…Level 2 is the more sophisticated understanding that one thing can look different from different perspectives. Before level 2 knowledge of visual perspective develops, children mistakenly assume that others see an object or scene in the most complete visual perspective possible (Liben, 1978;Light & Nix, 1983;Wimmer, Hogrefe, & Perner, 1988). That is, they assume the other person's perspective is an accurate and complete representation of reality as the child understands it.…”

The primacy of social over visual perspective-taking

“…In Yaniv and Shatz's (1990) study, 3-year-olds preferably positioned the duck facing the doll, even when asked to place it so that the doll would see its back. They thus exerted a bias to generate the canonical or good—in this case the frontal—view of the object, irrespective of the instruction (see Light and Nix, 1983; more on a similar phenomenon in children's drawings below).…”