Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Adults (Keysar et al, 2000) and children (Epley et al, 2004) sometimes commit egocentric errors when interpreting otherscommunication, if the self-perspective differs from the speakers perspective. Training imitation inhibition reduces egocen-tric error in adults (Santiesteban et al., 2011), presumably because it makes salient the distinction between self and other.As managing the self-other perspective difference may undergo developmental changes during preschool years (South-gate, in press), we tested whether a social imitation inhibition training may reduce egocentric mistakes in 3-6-year-oldchildren. Results with n=47 (of n=50 preregistered) children show that the imitation inhibition group selected the object towhich the speaker referred more often than children in a control condition (F(1,35)=5.346, p=.026). However, there wasan interaction with age (F(2,35)=3.805, p=.032): only 4-year-olds, but neither 3- nor 6-year-olds, were more accurate inthe inhibition group. Childrens reaction times and hesitation will be analyzed on the final sample.