Developmental Psychology1992, Vol. 28, No. 4, 635-643

Copyright 1992 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.0012-1649/92/$3.00

Children's Early Ability to Solve Perspective-Taking Problems

Nora NewcombeTemple University

Janellen HuttenlocherUniversity of Chicago

Piaget and Inhelder (1948/1967) claimed that, until 9 or 10 years of age, children had great diffi-culty with perspective taking. Huttenlocher and Presson (1979) showed, however, that these prob-lems were linked to conflict between actual and imagined frames of reference; asking what objectoccupied a specified location with respect to a hypothetical observer (item questions) led to muchbetter performance. The present experiments extend these findings to younger children: 5-year-olds (Experiment 1); 4-year-olds, for near and far locations but not left and right (Experiment 2);4-year-olds for left-right questions (Experiment 3); and 3-year-olds (Experiment 4). In addition,Experiment 4 showed that memory was not the basis for answering. These data show clearly thatpreschool children can indicate locations relative to another position.

Knowing the locations of things has obvious adaptive signifi-cance for human beings (and for other species). People need, forinstance, to keep track of the location of food and shelter, toavoid dangers, and to stay in contact with other people. Mem-ory for the location of such things must be maintained whenone moves around the environment as well as when one re-mains in a fixed position. In addition, it is often beneficial to beable to anticipate location relative to different potential vantagepoints (perspective taking). The present article concerns chil-dren's ability to perform perspective-taking tasks.

The most prominent account to date of the developmentalorigins of people's understanding of space and of their ability toconstruct other perspectives has been that of Piaget (Piaget &Inhelder, 1948/1967; Piaget, Inhelder, & Szeminska, 1948/1981). Piaget believed that an understanding of the spatialworld is constructed from humble innate beginnings and is notestablished in its adult form until the age of 9 or 10 years. Inparticular, he held that children could not succeed at perspec-tive-taking problems because they coded spatial location in afashion fundamentally different from that of adults.

Portions of this work were presented at meetings of the Jean PiagetSociety, June 1989, the Psychonomic Society, November 1989, and theSociety for Research in Child Development, April 1991. The work wassupported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Develop-ment Grant HD25137.

We thank Carolyn Spies, Kirsten DeConti, and Ann Prime for helpwith pilot work; Debbie Wright, Michael Tucker, Elizabeth Kru-pinski, and Dianna Zaring for running subjects; Dianna Zaring forsuggesting the method of hand marking used in Experiments 3 and 4;and William Fabricius, Clark Presson, Robert Weisberg, and the anon-ymous reviewers for comments and suggestions. We also thank thechildren, parents, and teachers at Temple University Day Care Center,Creative Learning Institute, Bright Start, Formative "Vears, Philadel-phia School, Jem's Day Care, Cedar Grove Christian Academy, Discov-ery Day Care, St. Luke's Day Care, Little Wonder, Manor DiscoveryCenter, and Tumble In.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed toNora Newcombe, Department of Psychology, Temple University, Phila-delphia, Pennsylvania 19122, or to Janellen Huttenlocher, Departmentof Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637.

Piaget believed that children used a topological system ofspatial representation, coding relationships such as touching,separation, enclosure, and proximity. He claimed that childrenwere incapable of metric coding of distance and hence wouldonly be able to code the location of objects as being in theneighborhood of landmarks. Perspective taking, according toPiaget, requires coding of information about the order of ob-jects along specified projection lines, a system of spatial repre-sentation said to emerge at approximately 9 or 10 years of age. Inaddition to his discussion of spatial representation, Piaget alsosuggested that young children might have difficulty with per-spective taking because of egocentrism, specifically, their in-ability to appreciate that observers in other locations have dif-ferent views.

Much of the work on perspective taking subsequent to Pia-get's has focused on the second issue. Flavell, Omanson, andLatham (1978), for instance, investigated preschoolers' under-standing that people with different viewpoints see differentthings. Yaniv and Shatz (1990) went a step further by showingthat preschool children can trace a line from the observer's eyesto the closest object or part of an object and say that that is whatthe observer is looking at. However, these investigators did notclaim that possession of such a line-of-sight heuristic indicatesthat young children possess the ability to determine the exactlocation of several objects in an array from a different view-point. Thus, research of this type does not question Piaget'sbelief that young children have a fundamentally different formof spatial representation from that of older children and adults,although it does undercut his claim that they suffer from ego-centrism (Newcombe, 1989).

Consider two reasons to suspect that young children's spatialcoding may not be fundamentally different from that of olderindividuals. First, evidence shows that 4-year-olds have a fun-damental understanding of distance in judgment tasks(Bartsch & Wellman, 1988; Fabricius & Wellman, 1991; Miller& Baillargeon, 1990). These findings cast doubt on one of Pia-get's claims about early spatial coding, namely, that it is nonme-tric. Even younger children have shown an ability to encode theamount of various kinds of self-movement in the environment

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636 NORA NEWCOMBE AND JANELLEN HUTTENLOCHER

(e.g., Pick & Rosengren, 1991; Rider & Rieser, 1988), to encodelocation of objects in a continuous space (Huttenlocher, New-combe, & Hollister, 1991), and to locate objects correctly aftermovement even when possible locations for the objects are notprespecified (Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 1990).

Second, perspective-taking tasks that require subjects towork out particular locations of objects appear to be difficultonly in certain formats. Specifically, subjects have problemswhen they are asked to select or construct a picture or modelshowing the display as it would appear from a different vantagepoint. However, in these cases, the subject is presented withpictures or models in which represented objects have mani-festly incorrect relations to the perceptually present frame ofreference.

For example, Figure 1 shows a ball in a particular position inrelation to a set of landmarks (door, window, desk, and filingcabinet). However, a picture or model of the array from a differ-ent vantage point shows the ball to the subject in quite differentrelations to those landmarks. Thus, picture or model tasks setup a conflict between actual frames of reference and frames ofreference appropriate for the picture or model, which must beimagined. Conflict between frames of reference is difficulteven for adults but is particularly problematic for 4- and 5-year-old children (Rieser & Garing, 1991). A natural response to thisconflict may be to select a picture showing the objects in theircorrect relations to the actual frame of reference, what Presson(1987) termed the "primary" use of spatial information.

The conflict between actual and imagined frames of refer-ence created by picture or model tasks is not a necessary part oftesting the ability to work out spatial relations from anotherpoint of view. One can also ask questions about what objectwould occupy a specified position with respect to another ob-

server (item questions), thus avoiding introducing a conflictingframe of reference.

Item questions can be answered by (a) locating the observerin terms of the actual frame of reference; (b) locating the posi-tion with respect to the observer's location specified in thequestion; and (c) reporting the identity of the object at thatlocation, specified in terms of the actual frame of reference.The third step could be completed from perception were thearray uncovered; however, when the array is covered, as it wasin Huttenlocher and Presson's (1979) research, the identity ofthe object must be retrieved from memory. These steps involvethe combination of perceptually present and stored informa-tion to yield new information.

Huttenlocher and Presson (1979) showed that 9-year-old chil-dren had little difficulty in answering item questions. Piaget, ofcourse, had argued that, even at this age, children cannot suc-ceed at perspective taking and are still using topological spatialrepresentations (i.e., are dependent on relations such as touch-ing and proximity), and thus need local landmarks if they are tocode location at all. More recently, however, several investiga-tors have presented evidence that, after the age of 7 or 8 years,children are not dependent on the presence of nearby land-marks to code location (Acredolo, Pick, & Olsen, 1975; Herman& Siegel, 1978). However, their findings suggest that 5- and6-year-old children performed quite poorly on location tasks inthe absence of nearby landmarks. If children at these ages aretruly dependent on nearby landmarks to code location, theymight have difficulty even on an item-question version of theperspective-taking task, because they would have difficulty en-coding the location of the objects in the array.

Huttenlocher and Newcombe (1984, Experiment 1), however,found evidence against the hypothesis of dependence on

desk

0>

snew

vantagepoint

subject

door

picture ofview from

new vantagepoint

Figure 1. Example of room, array, and picture in a picture-selection task.

CHILDREN'S EARLY ABILITY 637

nearby landmarks at 5 years. Although kindergarten childrenshowed the expected dependence on nearby landmarks when ameasure of metric accuracy was used, they could encode therelations among eight target objects in configural terms evenwhen there were no nearby landmarks. (See also Uttal, 1990.)Thus, children of this age were not restricted to coding locationmerely as in the neighborhood of a nearby landmark. Theirability to reproduce configuration when only distant land-marks were present shows that they were able to represent in-formation concerning the distance of targets from those land-marks. Such encoding is naturally more inexact when the land-marks in the frame of reference are more distant, but there is noevidence of qualitative developmental change in the dispositionor ability to use distant landmarks per se.

If spatial representation at 5 years is already in terms of dis-tance of targets from points in a frame of reference, then it ispossible that children of that age will perform well on perspec-tive-taking tasks of the type developed by Huttenlocher andPresson (1979). Some time ago, Harris and Bassett (1976) dem-onstrated that children as young as 4 years, when asked to builda model of a linear array of blocks, positioned the object thatwould be nearest a hypothetical observer first. They inter-preted this finding as showing that the children could infer therelation between a hypothetical observer and an object thatwould be adjacent to that observer, even though the children intheir study destroyed the adjacency relationship in their subse-quent efforts to position the rest of the blocks. In any case, theHarris and Bassett study leaves unsettled the question ofwhether the children could work out spatial relations other thanadjacency to that observer. Thus, the purpose of Experiment 1was to test whether 5-year-old children could answer questionsabout the specific locations of objects in an array from a van-tage point different than their own.

Experiment 1

Method

Subjects

The subjects were 32 children attending kindergarten at local privateschools. Mean age was 5 years and 4 months (range = 4 years and 9months to 5 years and 11 months). Half the subjects were randomlyassigned to the picture-selection condition and half to the item-ques-tion condition. Within conditions, half the subjects were boys and halfwere girls.

Materials

Four symmetric toy objects were used as stimuli: a black and yellowsoccer ball, a plastic cupcake with pink icing, a brown plastic bottle,and a plastic orange. They were arranged in a diamond pattern on a30-cm square wooden board. That is, one object was placed near eachof the four edges at the midpoint of the side so that two objects weredirectly in front of the subject, one close and one far, one object was tothe subject's left, and one object was to the right. A white cardboard lidcut to fit the board covered the array during experimental trials. In thepicture-selection condition, children also saw four color photographsof the array. One photograph was taken from the midpoint of each ofthe sides of the board. Testing was performed in a quiet room or area of

the children's schools. All areas were highly differentiated, withvarious fixed features, furniture, and decorative materials.

Procedure

Picture selection. Children were greeted, seated in a chair by thegame board, and shown the four toys. Their labels for the toys wereascertained, and they were promised stickers as a present for helpingwith the study. They were then introduced to the "pretend stool" andtold that they would be imagining sitting on it at different placesaround the board. They were shown the four photographs of the boardand were asked to choose the picture of their current perspective.("From where you are sitting right now, what does the board looklike?") Any mistakes were corrected. They were then asked which pho-tograph would show the board as seen from the pretend stool. ("If youwere sitting on the pretend stool over there, what would the board looklike to you? What picture shows that?")

Children were allowed to go over to the stool and come back to thepictures until a correct answer was given. This was done at each of thestool positions to be used in the experiment (90,180, and 270 degreesfrom the original vantage point). Mistakes were corrected without giv-ing "item" explanations. That is, the experimenter never said, for in-stance, "This is the correct picture- because it shows the soccer ballclosest to you, just as it is when you sit on the stool."

The experimenter next introduced the lid and asked each child toremember the toys. Children were asked to point to the photographshowing what they saw from their home position, with the board cov-ered, and then to indicate what they would see from the pretend stool,with the board covered. Mistakes were corrected, and children wereallowed to go to the pretend stool to observe the array again with thecover lifted, if necessary.

Following practice, children performed 16 experimental trials with-out feedback. They were asked about each of the four positions (0,90,180, and 270 degrees) four times. In each block of 4 trials, each of thefour positions was queried, but order of positions within a block oftrials was random. After every trial, the experimenter lifted the lid andasked children to make sure they knew where everything was.

Item questions. Children were greeted, seated, and introduced tothe board and the toys. They selected two stickers as presents for help-ing with the study, and one sticker was attached to each of their hands.The experimenter discussed with the children the idea that the stickersdefined sides of the body, so that, for instance, they had a "MickeyMouse side" and a "Donald Duck side," until children seemed comfort-able with the idea. Children were then asked to identify the toy closestto them on the board, the one farthest away, and the ones on each oftheir two sides. ("From where you are sitting right now, can you tell mewhich toy is closest to your body? Farthest from your body? On theDonald Duck side?") Any mistakes were corrected.

Children were then introduced to the "pretend stool" and shown itsfour possible locations. They were asked about what toys would beclosest to them, farthest from them, and on each side of them, if theywere seated on the stool, from each of the possible locations. ("Pretendyou are sitting on the stool. Which toy would be closest to yourbody?")1 Mistakes were corrected, and children were allowed to go tothe pretend stool to check their answers.

The experimenter then introduced the lid and asked children to

1 In a previous study, Spies, Newcombe, and Huttenlocher (1986)found that, when item questions are asked with respect to positions onthe table (i.e., what would be at the front, back, left side, or right side ofthe table from a new vantage point), 6-year-old children showed chanceperformance. Phrasing the question to refer precisely to the hypotheti-cal observer is crucial to children's understanding.

638 NORA NEWCOMBE AND JANELLEN HUTTENLOCHER

remember the location of the toys. Children were asked all four itemquestions from their original vantage point, with mistakes corrected,and were asked one or two item questions from each of the three pre-tend stool positions, again with feedback and trips to the stool as neces-sary. Following the practice, children performed 16 trials without feed-back and without moving around the board. All four item questions(closest, farthest, left side, right side) were asked from all four positions(0,90,180, and 270 degrees). Questions were blocked by position (i.e.,all four questions about one possible vantage point were asked beforemoving on to the next vantage point). Both order of questions withinvantage point and order of vantage points were randomized. Betweeneach trial, the experimenter uncovered the board and asked the chil-dren to check their memory for the location of the toys.

Results

Children made very few mistakes in either the item or thepicture-selection conditions when asked about their own van-tage point. In fact, in the item condition, all children werecorrect on all trials; in the picture-selection condition, 2 chil-dren made errors, with an overall performance of 94% correct.By contrast, performance on transformation trials, when chil-dren were asked about the view from the pretend stool, wasvery different for the two groups. Children in the item-questioncondition averaged 82% correct. Children in the picture-selec-tion condition were correct 43% of the time, a level still, how-ever, significantly better than chance performance of 25%,r(l 5) = 2.2, p < .05. The contrast between conditions was signifi-cant, r(31) = 4.1, p< .001.2

For the item condition only, it is also possible to contrast thedifficulty of questions about distance from observer in themidline (near and far questions) with the difficulty of questionsabout the observer's left and right sides. (One cannot, of course,perform such an analysis for the picture-selection task, becausethe child is asked only to choose the photograph showing all thecorrect spatial relations together, from another point of view)Performance was significantly better on near-far questions(94% correct) than on left-right questions (70% correct), ;(15) =3.4,p<.01.

Children's errors were classified as "egocentric" or not, thatis, as being a correct answer from the original vantage point ornot. In the picture-selection condition, 70% of the errors wereegocentric; in the item condition, 58% were egocentric. Differ-ences from chance were evaluated by a sign test on the numberof children (of children making errors) whose egocentric errorrates were greater than 33%. Egocentric errors in picture selec-tion were at above-chance levels, at a marginal level of signifi-cance (p = .059). Egocentric errors in item questions were notsignificantly above chance. The percentages of egocentricerrors in the two conditions did not differ significantly fromeach other.

The ability to answer item questions shown in these studiesgoes beyond the perspective-taking rules described by Flavelland his colleagues (1978) and the heuristics proposed by Yanivand Shatz (1990). Children with such skills are not claimed tobe able to work out the exact location of objects from a differentviewpoint, but the present data show that children can do ex-actly that.

Given the success of 5-year-olds, one wonders whether stillyounger children could succeed at perspective-taking questionsif interference between actual and imagined frameworks wereavoided. Thus, in Experiment 2, we tested 4-year-olds to deter-mine whether they could successfully answer item questions.As before, success on this task, coupled with difficulty in pic-ture selection, indicates coding of location using spatial frame-works and an ability to operate on that encoding to generatenew information.

Experiment 2

Method

Subjects

Subjects were 30 children attending local preschools and day-carecenters. Mean age was 4 years and 6 months (range = 4 years to 4 yearsand 11 months). There were 14 subjects in the appearance conditionand 16 in the item-question condition. Within conditions, half thesubjects were boys and half were girls.

Materials

Four symmetric objects were used as stimuli: a black and yellowsoccer ball, a blue LEGO block, a green cone, and an orange ring. Theobjects were arranged in a diamond pattern on a 30-cm square woodenboard. Each object was placed in the center of a paper circle (6.35-cmdiameter). During experimental trials, each object was hidden with apaper cup so that item questions could be phrased in terms of hiding(see later discussion); paper cups were used instead of a lid covering thewhole board because pilot work showed that the hiding format in-creased the children's interest in and understanding of the task. In theappearance condition, children also saw four color photographs of thearray.

Procedure

The procedure closely resembled that of Experiment 1, with twoexceptions. First, for both conditions, three chairs were placed in eachof the three possible other viewing conditions to eliminate the need forthe experimenter to constantly move the "pretend stool" denning theposition of the imagined observer. Moving the chair frequently seemedto be distracting to younger children and added time to the procedure.The "chairs" were a stool, a milk crate, and a child's chair. In addition,in the item condition, a change was made in the phrasing of the ques-

Discussion

These data demonstrate that children as young as 5 years cantake the spatial perspective of others. Children's problems withperspective taking stem in large part from conflict betweenactual and imagined frames of reference and are vastly reducedby the use of item questions. The data very closely resemble theresults of Huttenlocher and Presson (1979).

2 In this and the following experiments, sex differences were ana-lyzed but were never found to be significant as a main effect or to enterinto an interpretable interaction. Thus, sex is not discussed further.Another variable we examined in preliminary analyses but do not re-port here is the effect of view (whether questions concerned the van-tage point at 90, 180, or 270 degrees). Previous studies have foundwidely varying results for this variable, and differences may representchance fluctuations (Newcombe, 1989).

CHILDREN'S EARLY ABILITY 639

tions. The experimenter asked what the child would find under a speci-fied cup if sitting in a specified chair. For instance, one question was,"If you were sitting in the blue chair, what would be under the cupclosest to you?"

Results

In the picture-selection condition, children were unable toselect photographs correctly, even from their own vantagepoint. Many of them insisted that all the pictures were correct,because they all showed all four objects in the display. Giventhis problem, the data from the picture-selection condition arenot analyzed further.

In the item condition, children had no difficulty with ques-tions about their own vantage point; 1 child made one error. Ontransformation trials, children were 47% correct overall, a levelsignificantly above chance, t{l 5) = 2.8, p < .05. However, perfor-mance on near-far trials was 67%, significantly higher thanperformance on left-right trials, which was only 27%, ?(15) =6.75, p < .001. Performance on left-right trials was very close tothe chance level of 25%. Performance on near trials was identi-cal to that on far trials; both questions were answered correctly67% of the time.

Errors were overwhelmingly (93%) egocentric. This was trueboth for near-far questions (91% of errors egocentric) and forleft-right questions (94% egocentric).

Discussion

Four-year-olds were successful with near and far item ques-tions. This finding shows that they understand the general ideaof perspective change and that they can not only work out theobject closest to the hypothetical observer, as suggested byHarris and Bassett (1976), but that they can also apply metricnotions with respect to a hypothetical vantage point in a fash-ion sufficient to distinguish near from far locations.

One striking limitation of the performance of the 4-year-oldswas that we were unable to get subjects to select the correctpicture in the picture-selection condition, even from their ownperspective. Similar problems were reported by Liben (1978)and Gzesh and Surber (1985). The existence of these problemsemphasizes the difficulty of the picture-selection methodologyand the importance of ensuring high performance from theoriginal vantage point before any errors in perspective takingare interpreted.

In speculating as to the source of the 4-year-olds' difficulty inselecting their own view, it is interesting to remember that,although 4-year-olds are able to use simple maps or modelsaligned with a space to find objects hidden in the space, theyhave great difficulty with using maps if they are presented outof alignment. Five-year-olds perform much better on such atask (Bluestein & Acredolo, 1979). The location errors made by4-year-olds in the unaligned map task are largely egocentric;that is, they result from using the unaligned map as if relationsbetween elements on the map and the self could be translateddirectly to the real space. In other words, children do not estab-lish a relational correspondence between the spatial relations inthe map and those in the real world but simply concentrate onthe identity correspondence of the individual elements (Pres-

son, 1987). Similarly, when asked to select pictures in the pres-ent study, children did not consider differences among the pic-tures in relational correspondence of pictured and real-worldelements. In fact, they indicated their focus on identity corre-spondence explicitly in saying that all the pictures were correctbecause all showed all four objects. By 5 years of age, childrenseem to be more likely to note and assess relational correspon-dences.3

A second, and very theoretically important, difference seenbetween 4- and 5-year-olds was that 4-year-olds answered leftand right questions only at chance levels. In addition, errors,even on item questions, were overwhelmingly "egocentric."This fact cannot, however, be interpreted as reflecting a generalegocentrism, because the children showed the ability to takethe perspective of the other in answering near-far questions.

There are at least three possible reasons for the problemsseen with left-right questions. First, 4-year-olds' poor perfor-mance might simply be due to the general difficulty with dif-ferentiating the left side from the right side of one's own bodyoften evident until 6 years and the further difficulty of applyingthe left-right distinction to another figure (Corballis & Beale,1983). The sticker technique we used to differentiate the sidesof the body may have been insufficient to overcome left-rightconfusion. In particular, children may have had difficulty re-membering which hand was marked with which sticker. Thus,in Experiment 3, we differentiated the hands in a simpler way:One hand was marked with a sticker and the other one was leftbare.

However, left-right confusion cannot be the only factorcreating problems for the 4-year-olds. In that case, one wouldexpect that left-right reversals would predominate amongerrors, but only one instance of such a reversal error was ob-served. A second explanation of the difficulties 4-year-olds ex-perienced with left-right questions is that the children mighthave failed to imagine a differentiated person with left andright sides on the chair. To deal with this possibility, in Experi-ment 3, a doll with marked hands was shown sitting on eachchair before the procedure began.

A third account of the poor performance with left-right ques-tions might be that, at 4 years of age, children can answer ques-tions about spatial relations only when at least one of the twoobjects to be related is physically present. Thus, they fail withleft-right questions and succeed with near-far not because ofany factor related to those dimensions, but because, in thecurrent situation, near-far is defined with respect to a physi-cally present chair but left-right is defined only with respect toa hypothetical observer. On this account, preschoolers' abilityto answer questions about spatial location is limited to relationsbetween entities in which at least one is perceptually available.To assess this possibility, in Experiment 3, we included a condi-tion in which no stools, crates, or chairs were present after the

3 DeLoache's work on children's use of models and pictures in ahiding task (see DeLoache, 1990, for a review) shows that, by the age of3 years, children can appreciate identity correspondences betweenmodels and real spaces; for pictures, they can see the identity corre-spondences at even younger ages. However, solution of DeLoache'shiding tasks does not necessitate use of spatial relations.

640 NORA NEWCOMBE AND JANELLEN HUTTENLOCHER

training phase and compared performance with the observer'slocation marked only by pointing of the experimenter to perfor-mance when objects marked the observer's location. Given thedata from Experiment 2, we did not attempt to use pictureselection in this study.

questions, F(\, 30) = 76.6, p < .001. Egocentric errors were 35%of errors, not more likely than chance. This was true both fornear-far questions (43% egocentric responses) and left-rightquestions (33% egocentric responses).

Experiment 3

Method

Subjects

The subjects were 32 children attending local preschools and day-care centers. Mean age was 4 years and 5 months (range = 4 years to 4years and 11 months). There were 16 children in the seat-present condi-tion (8 boys and 8 girls) and 16 children in the seat-absent condition (10boys and 6 girls).

Materials and Procedure

There were three main differences between Experiments 2 and 3.First, children's hands were marked with only a single sticker, and thehands were referred to subsequently as the "sticker hand" and the"other hand." Within condition, half the subjects were randomly as-signed to have their left hands marked and the other half, their righthands marked.

Second, a large doll was introduced immediately after children'shands were marked. With the doll aligned with the child, a sticker wasplaced on one of the doll's hands on the same side as the child's markedhand. The experimenter then demonstrated how the doll looked whenseated in each of the three chairs around the table, drawing children'sattention to the sticker hand and the other hand. The sticker was thenremoved from the doll, and children were asked to point out whichhand of the doll would be the sticker hand for each of the three loca-tions. The children had little difficulty with these judgments; 27 of the32 children were correct at all three positions the first time the ques-tions were asked, and the remaining 5 required only a second round ofquestions before performing without error.

The third difference between Experiments 2 and 3 was that therewere objects present (stool, crate, or chair) in each of the other potentialvantage points, as there had been in Experiment 2, for only half thechildren. In the other condition, the seats were removed after the dollprocedure was completed, and other vantage points were marked onlyby the experimenter pointing to a spot and asking the child what wouldbe seen from "over there." This was the procedure originally used with9-year-olds by Huttenlocher and Presson (1979).

Results

From their own vantage point, children's performance wasvirtually perfect; 1 child made one error. On transformationtrials, overall performance was 71%, well above chance andsignificantly higher than the 47% observed in Experiment 2,<(46) = 3.0, p < .005. The same performance levels were ob-served with and without seats present as perceptual referencepoints, with 67% and 74% correct in the two conditions, respec-tively. Performance on near-far questions was 88% and on left-right questions, 53%.

These data were subjected to analysis of variance (ANOVA),with condition (seats present or not) as a between-subjects vari-able and type of question (left-right vs. near-far) as a within-subjects variable. The analysis confirmed that the only signifi-cant effect was near-far questions being easier than left-right

Discussion

In contrast to Experiment 2, 4-year-olds in this study per-formed above chance on left-right as well as on near-far ques-tions. Differentiating between the identities of two stickers mayhave been a problem for the children in Experiment 2, who mayalso have failed to imagine a person in the other vantage pointsand to define that person as having sides. The ease with whichthese difficulties were overcome, however, suggests that neitherproblem represents a fundamental limitation on 4-year-olds'ability to represent and transform spatial information.

Left-right questions were more difficult for subjects in Ex-periment 3 as they had been for 5-year-olds in Experiment 1.This phenomenon, however, may simply stem from the inher-ent nature of the left-right axis. The left-right axis is generallyless salient than the front-back and up-down axes, for adults aswell as children, because it is unmarked and depends on thefront-back axis for definition. Thus, Franklin and Tversky(1990) found that adults imagining environments are slower torespond to left-right questions than to front-back questions,which are in turn more difficult than up-down questions. Thiswas true even though in their experiment the axes needed to bepositioned only with respect to the actual self, not to a hypothet-ical observer.

The data on performance without seats present show deci-sively that preschool children are not dependent on the pres-ence of physical reference points for answering questions aboutspatial relations. Our intuition that these reference pointswould be helpful, which led to introducing the seats in Experi-ments 1 and 2, turns out to have been quite erroneous. Pre-schoolers' ability to infer spatial location is apparently not lim-ited, and can involve unoccupied and hypothetical points.

In this experiment, as well as in the previous two, the sameobjects were used to form the array in both the practice phase ofthe study and the test. One question that might arise, given thisprocedure, is whether children's performance reflects memori-zation of the correct answers during the practice phase. Such anexplanation seems somewhat unlikely for two reasons. First, itwould be very confusing to remember a matrix of hypotheticallocations by kinds of item questions. Second, the same kind ofpractice was given in Experiments 1 and 2 with picture selec-tion, but performance remained at low or chance levels. Never-theless, to rule out the memory explanation empirically, Exper-iment 4 was conducted. Children responded either to the sameset of toys throughout or experienced a switch in toy sets be-tween the practice and test phases.

There were two additional purposes of Experiment 4. First,we aimed to replicate the null findings in Experiment 3 regard-ing the comparison of performance with and without seats pres-ent. Second, a group of 3-year-olds was included, as well as4-year-olds, to test the limits of children's ability to answer itemquestions.

CHILDREN'S EARLY ABILITY 641

Experiment 4

Method

Subjects

The subjects were 64 children attending preschools and day-carecenters. There were 32 three-year-olds (mean age = 3 years and 7months; range = 3 years and 3 months to 3 years and 11 months) and 32four-year-olds (mean age = 4 years and 7 months; range = 4 years to 5years and 1 month). Within age, children were equally divided betweena condition in which toy sets were switched between practice and testand a condition in which the same set was used throughout and evenlydivided within these cells between those performing with seats presentor with seats absent. Among 3-year-olds, 17 children were boys and 15were girls, and among 4-year-olds, 16 were boys and 16 were girls. Sexwas balanced, as far as possible, within the cells of the design.

Materials and Procedure

The only major difference between Experiments 3 and 4 occurred inthe switch condition. For these children, the practice phase of thestudy was followed by the introduction of the new set of toys and ashort period of training to ensure memorization of the location of thetoys from the child's vantage point. Children never viewed this arrayfrom any other vantage point.

Toy Set 1 consisted of a doughnut, a LEGO block, a cup, and a soccerball. Toy Set 2 consisted of a stone, a wooden block, a spool, and abead. Half the children in the switch condition were trained with ToySet 1 and tested with Toy Set 2, whereas for the remainder, the oppositeorder was used. Children in the no-switch condition were evenly di-vided between those using Toy Set 1 and those using Toy Set 2. Prelimi-nary analyses showed no effects as a result of toy sets or order of toysets.

Results

From their own vantage point, children made no errors. Ontransformation trials, overall performance was 75%: 70% for3-year-olds and 79% for 4-year-olds. Performance in the no-switch condition was 73% and in the switch condition, 76%.Performance was 72% correct with seats present and 77% with-out. Near-far trials were 90% correct (with near and far equal toeach other), and left-right trials were 59% correct. All levelswere above chance.

The data were subjected to ANOVA. There were three be-tween-subjects factors: age (3 or 4 years), toy set switched be-tween practice and test (yes or no), and seats present at test (yesor no). There was one within-subjects factor: type of question(near-far or left-right). The analysis showed two significantmain effects: age, F(l, 56) = 4.04, p < .05, and type of question,F(l, 56) = 75.22, p < .001. The only significant interaction was aquadruple interaction of switch, age, chair, and type of ques-tion, which was uninterpretable.

Egocentric errors were above chance for 3-year-olds, at 66%(69% on near-far, 65% on left-right), but were at chance levelsfor 4-year-olds, 44% (42% and 45%, respectively). The older chil-dren were more likely than the younger ones to have egocentricerror rates at or below chance levels, x2 (1> N = 53 childrenmaking at least one error) = 3.90, p < .05.

Discussion

The most important purpose of Experiment 4 was to assesswhether the results of the previous three studies were due tochildren remembering answers to questions from the practicesession of the experiment. The data show clearly that this wasnot the case. When toy sets were changed for the test questionsand children never saw the new array from another vantagepoint and never received any feedback on questions, perfor-mance was at levels indistinguishable from (and, in fact, slightlyif nonsignificantly higher than) when the same toy set remainedin place throughout the study.

The experiment also succeeded in replicating the null effectof presence or absence of chairs found in Experiment 3. Again,if anything, performance was slightly higher without chairsavailable as perceptual reference points.

Finally, the experiment extended the findings of the previousstudies to 3-year-olds. Although there was a significant age dif-ference between the 3- and the 4-year-olds and 3-year-olds didmake egocentric errors, it is still quite remarkable that 3-year-old performance was significantly above chance, even on theleft-right questions (54%).

General Discussion

Piaget's main theoretical interest in the perspective-takingtask was as evidence for his proposal that there are fundamentaldevelopmental changes in the nature of spatial representation,that is, his proposed sequence from topological to projectiveand Euclidean representation. It is difficult to interpret thepresent data on early success with item questions within thatframework. The data have a natural explanation, on the otherhand, in terms of children's difficulty in dealing with conflict-ing frames of reference. On this account, item questions can beanswered because they do not entail conflict between twoframes of reference, whereas picture-selection tasks are diffi-cult because they do entail such conflict.

This is not to say that there is no developmental change in theability to deal with spatial tasks. There are developmentalchanges, as the present experiments show, in several importantaspects of spatial performance, including ability to deal withconflicting frames of reference, ease of differentiating along theleft-right dimension, and the propensity to make egocentricerrors. These changes clearly affect ability to perform variousreal-world perspective-taking tasks and are interesting topicsfor further study. However, it is not necessary to postulate repre-sentational change to account for any of these changes.

Let us discuss further why the Piagetian typology of spatialrepresentation has difficulty explaining the present data (aswell as suffering from important internal gaps and inconsisten-cies; see Mandler, 1983).4 There are at least three ways that we

4 Piaget's more recent discussions of spatial development (Beilin,1989) do not seem to have changed the theory in ways that are germaneto the present discussion. In fact, if anything, the increased emphasison early spatial coding as intrafigural exacerbates the problems of thetheory. Such a model clearly predicts that young children would becompletely unable to code spatial location at all unless targets werecontiguous with visible landmarks.

642 NORA NEWCOMBE AND JANELLEN HUTTENLOCHER

can see to attempt to explain the data within the Piagetiantypology. First, one might interpret the present experiments assimply showing that projective encoding is present much earlierthan Piaget thought (while still preceded by topological repre-sentation). This hypothesis leaves unaddressed, however, whypicture selection poses such problems when item questions donot. It also entails a rather drastic downward revision in the ageproposed for projective encoding.

Second, one might argue that success with item questionscould be based on topological coding. Such an explanation istechnically possible, because item questions ask about speci-fied relations of proximity, (i.e., what is close to the observer, farfrom the observer, close to the left hand, and close to the righthand). However, although Piaget included proximity as a topo-logical category, doing so involves the importation of metricnotions into the idea of topology (Newcombe, 1988). Further-more, postulating "topological" relations between entities, oneof which is imagined (the hypothetical observer) and one ofwhich is hidden (the target object), seems to strain the meaningof topology.

Third, one could appeal to Piaget's distinction between"practical" and "conceptual" uses of space (see Liben, 1981, fora discussion of this distinction). One might suggest that itemquestions test children's abilities in "practical space" but nottheir conceptual understanding, whereas picture selection taps"conceptual space," which does undergo representationalchange. It is difficult to see, however, in what sense item ques-tions are part of "practical space." They do not involve action inthe world or direct perceptual feedback about closeness togoals, looming objects requiring detours, and so on. As dis-cussed in the introduction, item questions involve the combina-tion of information that is perceptually available with informa-tion stored in memory to yield new information.

It is true that answering item questions is supported by theimmediate perceptual environment. That is the point of thecontrast to picture selection: Conflict between frameworks hasbeen eliminated. Presson's (1987) distinction between primaryand secondary uses of space may offer a better way to concep-tualize the relevant distinction than is provided by the contrastbetween practical and conceptual space. Presson denned pri-mary uses of space as involving orientation to the immediateperceptual surround and secondary uses of space as dealingwith information to which one is not directly oriented. Second-ary uses of spatial information are thus more abstract thanprimary uses. However, primary uses are not simply percep-tual, nor need they be unsymbolic.

A striking example of the fact that primary orientation to asurrounding space does not depend on perception occurs whensubjects are asked to imagine being in a particular environmentin a particular position and facing direction and then are askedto imagine a change in position or facing direction. Their subse-quent pointing to objects is very poor. However, if they areallowed to move physically within their present environment,their pointing is greatly facilitated, even though none of theobjects in the immediate surround is relevant to the imaginedtask at all (Montello, Presson, & DeLange, 1988; Rieser, 1989;Rieser & Garing, 1991). Thus, the primary spatial orientationof the subject is not perceptual but is a symbolic representation

susceptible to interference and updated in a direct way by physi-cal movement.

Development clearly occurs in children's ability to make sec-ondary use of space. The difficulty of picture-selection tasksthrough the age of 10 years is evidence of this. On our account,how do children come to solve picture-selection tasks? Onepossibility is that they learn to use a strategy for dealing withthem in which they focus on a single item. That is, one can poseoneself an item question concerning, for instance, what objectwould be in front if one occupied a certain position. One canthen select a picture showing that object in front (assumingnone of the pictures involve scramblings of the array, so thatsuch a choice could potentially miss the incorrect placement ofsome other item). By age 7, children seem to use such a strategyto a limited extent, but their responses to other foils suggest thatthe strategy is not common or easy (Bialystok, 1989). Bialystokdid not find consistent use of such a strategy and improvedability to select pictures until the age of 9 or 10. Thus, whatseems to change in the elementary school years is not the formof spatial representation but a strategy for dealing with conflictbetween frameworks.

A secondary theme to that of representation in Piaget's dis-cussion of the perspective-taking task was that success consti-tuted (or was derived from) the lessening of egocentrism. Theterm egocentrism, however, was ambiguous. The primarymeaning in Piaget's discussions of perspective taking appearsto be a lack of understanding that there are different view-points than one's own. A secondary meaning defines egocen-trism as the representation of spatial location with respect toone's own body (what has, more recently, been called viewer-centered representations).5 The present data clearly indicatethat children as young as 5 years are not egocentric in either ofthe two senses. They understand that other vantage pointscommand different views, and they do not code location onlywith respect to their own body position. These conclusions con-firm others in the perspective-taking literature (see Newcombe,1989, for a review).

Huttenlocher and Newcombe's (1984) account of spatial cod-ing suggests that the concept of egocentrism should be definedas viewer-centered spatial representation or as involving use ofthe viewer as a landmark in a frame of reference. A viewer canbe considered a landmark, albeit a very special one, in severalways. A viewer is a differentiated creature with front, back, andsides. Furthermore, distance and angle from this self may havea privileged status as the output of ordinary perceptual analysis.However, movement of the self results in a loss of a landmarkunless the unoccupied point is maintained in memory or theamount of movement is represented. Thus, egocentrism can beconsidered more specifically as the issue of when and how theself is used as a landmark in coding and whether movement ofthis landmark can be accommodated and under what circum-stances. Pick and Rieser (1982) pointed out, in a similar vein,that there are immature and mature levels of self-reference;

5 Piaget defined egocentrism in infancy as sensorimotor coding ofan object as obtainable by a particular motor movement, again withviewer-centered representation as a subsidiary meaning.

CHILDREN'S EARLY ABILITY 643

when self-reference is subject to updating when one moves, itcan actually be quite a powerful system for spatial representa-tion.

In summary, the present data on preschoolers' ability to an-swer item questions can most naturally be explained on theassumption that, by age 3, children code spatial location interms of a frame of spatial reference, including coding of hypo-thetically occupied points, and can use these codings to answerquestions about specific relations between hypothetically occu-pied points and locations stored in memory. They have diffi-culty, however, with these judgments when faced with conflict-ing frames of reference. There seems little need to postulate thatpreschool children use fundamentally different systems of spa-tial representation from those used by older children or adults.There is developmental change after age 3, however, in severalimportant aspects of spatial thought, including, most notably,the ability to deal with conflicting frames of reference.

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Received September 19,1990Revision received November 19,1991

Accepted November 19,1991 •