The Early Development of Inferences about the Visual Percepts of Others

Abstract

MASANGKAY, ZENAIDA S.; McCLUSKEY, KATHLEEN A.; MCINTYRE, CURTIS W.; SIMS-KNIGHT, JUDITH; VAUGHN, BRIAN E.; and FLAVELL, JOHN H. The Early Development of Inferences about the Visual Percepts of Others. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1974, 45, 357-366. 3 experiments assessed the ability of 2-5-year-old children to infer, under very simple task conditions, what another person sees when viewing something from a position other than the children's own. Some ability of this genre appears to exist by 2-3 years of age, at least. The data suggest a distinction between an earlier (Level 1) and a later (Level 2) developmental form of visual percept inference. At Level 1, S is capable of nonegocentrically inferring that O sees an object presently nonvisible to S himself. At Level 2, S is also capable of nonegocentrically inferring how an object that both currently see appears to O, that is, how it looks from his particular spatial perspective.