Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To successfully navigate the complex social world, peopleoften need to solve the problem of perspective selection:Between two conflicting viewpoints of the self and the other,whose perspective should one take? In two experiments, weshow that four-year-olds use others’ knowledge and goals todecide when to engage in visual perspective taking. Childrenwere more likely to take a social partner’s perspective todescribe an ambiguous symbol when she did not knownumbers and wanted to learn than when she knew numbersand wanted to teach. These results were shown in children’sown responses (Experiment 1) and in their evaluations ofothers’ responses (Experiment 2). By preschool years,children understand when perspective taking is appropriateand necessary and selectively take others’ perspectives insocial interactions. These results provide novel insights intothe nature and the development of perspective taking.