Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies have shown that readers often overestimatethe similarity between their perspective and the perspective ofprotagonists in a story. This egocentric projection is argued tooriginate from readers’ tendency to use their own knowledgeas a frame of reference from which they (insufficiently) adjustaway to account for protagonists’ less informed perspective.This experimental study demonstrated that readers usefeedback about protagonists’ knowledge status to drawinferences that are more accurate on future perspective-takingtrials. Readers who were given the opportunity to learn throughfeedback not only adjusted their perspective-judgment morethan those who did not receive feedback, these readers alsoshowed less egocentric projection on future assessments.