Visual perspective taking in children: further ramifications of an information-processing model.
Forty children between ages 6 and 8 were administered a set of spatial perspective tasks. On half of the items, children responded by rotating a duplicate of the target display; on the remainder, children reconstructed the displays to correspond to a perspective view. The displays differed as to whether they contained marked or unmarked objects. On the basis of an information-processing analysis of these tasks, we predicted that the response-type variables and stimulus variables would interact in known ways. Analysis of variance results revealed a good fit with the hypothesized outcomes. Main effects were detected for age, which favored older children, and for display, which favored unmarked objects; the rotation task proved easier. Significant interactions revealed that task demands increasing task difficulty were more problematic in the construction task than in the rotation task, as predicted.
D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011601:Psychophysics; D013028:Space Perception