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Children's use of social and visual perspective-taking in reference resolution

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Children's use of social and visual perspective-taking in reference resolution

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PERSPECTIVE-‐TAKING
IN
REFERENCE
RESOLUTION

Children’s Use of Social and Visual Perspective-taking in Reference Resolution
Derya Kadipasaoglu
BA, The University of Texas at Austin, 2012

Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the Degree of
Masters of Arts
Psychology

University of Southern California
December 2014
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Abstract
Studies of visual perspective-taking have been built on the assumption that speakers refer
only to objects that are located in their visual field. However, everyday speech is filled
with references, including requests, to objects that are outside of one’s view. In the
present study, eighteen 3.5-year-old children participated in a referential communication
task that required them to interpret requests made both for objects in and out of the
speaker’s visual field. More specifically, only in one condition (Visual Condition) did the
speaker request an object that she could actually see. In the other two conditions, the
child had to consider what the speaker needed (Pragmatic Condition), and what the
speaker wanted given her familiarity with or ignorance of objects (Prior Engagement
Condition). Children were successful in the Pragmatic Condition and Prior Engagement
Condition, but showed poor performance in the Visual Condition. This pattern of findings
supports the idea that children come to understand references to objects that are mutually
known or based on pragmatic considerations before they learn to take into account
another’s visuo-spatial perspective (Moll & Kadipasaoglu, 2013). A broadened scope of
referential acts that includes references to non-visible objects in future studies may lead
to a more complete picture of early perspective-taking skills.

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Table of Contents
Page
Abstract .......................................................................................................................... ii
List of figures ............................................................................................................... iv
Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1: Review of Literature .................................................................................... 3
Chapter 2: Experiment ................................................................................................. 14
Method ................................................................................................................. 15
Results and Discussion ......................................................................................... 22
References ................................................................................................................... 29
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List of Figures
Page
Figure 1. Aerial view of the experimental set-up. ....................................................... 18
Figure 2. View of shelf with demo objects from (a) the child’s view, and (b) E1’s
view. ............................................................................................................................ 19

Figure 3. View of shelf when E1 asks for “the short cup” from (a) the child’s view,
and (b) E1’s view. ........................................................................................................ 21

Figure 4. Mean proportion of correct selection responses in Prior Engagement,
Visual, and Pragmatic Conditions. .............................................................................. 23

Figure 5. Mean proportion of correct first touch responses in Prior Engagement,
Visual, and Pragmatic conditions. ............................................................................... 24

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INTRODUCTION
Communication is an interactive and cooperative endeavor, the success of which
is hinged on an implicit agreement between interlocutors to produce speech that is clear,
relevant and coherent according to one another’s viewpoints (Grice, 1975). Referential
ambiguities nonetheless permeate everyday discourse. When speech is or remains
ambiguous, interlocutors must rely on visuo-spatial or social cues to accurately locate the
referent mentioned by their discourse partner.
Much of previous research with children and adults has aimed to evaluate how the
understanding of another’s visual perspective (e.g., Epley, Morewedge, & Keysar, 2004)
or knowledge or belief states (e.g., Akhtar, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 1996; Keysar, Lin,
& Barr, 2003) may be used to disambiguate speech with reference resolution tasks.
Visual perspective-taking tasks typically require, for example, a child to disambiguate an
adult’s request for an object by using information about the adult’ visuo-spatial position
relative to two or more objects. In such designs, an object visible only to the child must
be ignored in favor of an object that is mutually visible to the child and the adult (e.g.,
Nadig & Sedivy, 2002). Conversely, the target may be an object that is visible to the
child but hidden from the adult’s perspective, which the child is to infer based on the
adult’s explicit searching behavior (e.g., Moll & Tomasello, 2006; Nurmsoo & Bloom,
2008).
Such investigations begin with the presumption that requests are only made for
objects that one can see, or of whose existence she is aware. This, however, constrains
the reality of everyday requests. Interlocutors often ask for objects whose locations are
known but that they cannot presently see. For example, while speaking in the kitchen one
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person might ask another for the book, which is mutually known to be on the living room
table. The speaker may even be altogether ignorant of the existential status of the
referent, such as when a plumber under the sink tells his assistant that he needs something
to stop this leak. In this case, the referent of something is as of yet unidentified by the
plumber, but his assistant who has access to an array of potential referents can select the
one that is optimally helpful.
Experimenters studying the emergence of perspective-taking skills have largely
ignored these types of referential acts, though they are ubiquitous in speech. Most
importantly, studies on visual perspective-taking often ignored the fact that people
frequently request things that are outside of their immediate visual field—with no
interpretive difficulties for the recipient of the request whatsoever. The current project is
a first attempt to correct this exaggerated emphasis of visual access using a task that was
specifically designed for young children. In contrast to prior visual perspective-taking
tests, the task that we developed requires not just an awareness of what another sees, but
also pragmatic considerations of the speaker’s needs as well as an acknowledgment of
prior interactions with objects, over and above their current visibility for the speaker.
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Chapter 1: Review of Literature
Social perspective-taking is used here to mean the ability to track another’s
experiential record (Perner & Roessler, 2012): one’s prior discourse, prior affective
expressions, and prior engagement with objects. Visual perspective-taking, by contrast,
denotes the understanding of how another’s immediate spatial relation to an object may
affect her visual access to that object. That is, following Flavell (1992), one must
understand that what is visible to herself may not be visible to another because of, for
example, a barrier (level 1), or that how two people perceive the same object will differ
according to their spatial positions relative to it (level 2). Together, these perspective-
taking skills facilitate the interpretation of speech that may otherwise be ambiguous.
Intuition may suggest that ontogenetically, the ability to compute the visuo-spatial
relation between persons and objects precedes the emergence of social perspective-taking
skills. Because perceptual information is instantaneously accessible, visual perspective-
taking is often assumed to be more easily accomplished and even serve as the foundation
upon which apparently more complex, social perspective-taking skills are built (Kessler
& Thomson, 2010). Models of mutual knowledge similarly identify physical co-presence
as the easiest way in which common ground is built between interlocutors (Clark &
Marshall, 1981; Schiffer, 1972). Empirical work has shown, however, that it is later in
development that children begin to register differences in immediate perceptual
experiences than when they are able to use the knowledge of what another has witnessed,
done or discussed in order to disambiguate language (Moll & Kadipasaoglu, 2013).
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By their second year of life, infants maintain a record of what others have or have
not experienced in the immediate past, and they draw upon this knowledge for the
purposes of both language comprehension and production (Akhtar, Carpenter, &
Tomasello, 1996; Moll, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2011; O’Neill, 1996). Twelve-month-
olds, for instance, were able to distinguish which one out of three familiar toys was new
for an adult. When the adult excitedly requested a toy, the infant chose the one with
which the adult had not previously engaged (Tomasello & Haberl, 2003). MacPherson
and Moore (2010) found that 19-month-olds selected the correct referent of an adult’s
request when, along with two mutually familiar toys, there was a toy that was novel for
the adult but not for the infant, as well as a toy that was novel for the infant. The infants
responded to the request by choosing the object that was novel for the adult. Thus, 19-
month-olds differentiated between their own and another’s familiarity with the objects,
and took this difference into consideration when responding to the adult’s request. This
ability was not yet present in 13-month-olds, who egocentrically chose the toy that was
novel from their own perspective. These studies demonstrate that before they have
completed 2 years of life, infants are already sensitive to others’ familiarity with or
ignorance of objects, and this awareness can serve as a fruitful cue for disambiguating
reference.
There are limitations, however, to this nascent ability. Moll, Carpenter, and
Tomasello (2007) manipulated whether 14-month-olds merely observed an adult
experience two objects with another experimenter or participated with the adult in joint
visual engagement around the objects. After jointly engaging with the infant or another
experimenter, the adult left the room and the infant was familiarized with a third object.
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When the adult returned, she excitedly requested an object from the infant. Infants who
had jointly engaged with the adult correctly chose the third object that was novel for the
adult, despite their own familiarity with it. When the infants had only observed the adult
jointly engaging around the objects with the second experimenter, they did not pick the
novel object. It therefore seems that at 14 months of age, the ability to track others’
experiential records relies critically on joint engagement, though 18-month-olds can track
what adults have experienced from observation alone (Moll & Tomasello, 2007). This is
perhaps because the recognition of another’s viewpoint is facilitated when it coincides
with one’s own; thus, it is first through shared goals or shared attention that infants
become aware of others’ experiences.
Early on, infants are also sensitive to referents that have been introduced in the
discourse, or “linguistic co-presence” (Clark & Marshall, 1981) between themselves and
another (Ganea & Saylor, 2007; O’Neill, 1996). In Ganea and Saylor (2007), an adult
mentioned an absent object (e.g., “the puppy”) and then asked 15- and 18-month-olds for
one of two objects using an indefinite pronoun (e.g., “Can you get it for me?”). Both age
groups chose the objects to which the adult had referred to by name (e.g., “the puppy”)
moments earlier. Prior physical co-presence between the adult, infant, and object,
therefore, was not necessary for infants to locate the correct referent in later discourse.
Moreover, infants were also sensitive to the source of the reference when selecting an
object. They did not choose, e.g., the puppy, if a second experimenter who had not
previously mentioned the puppy made the ambiguous request. These results suggest that
infants build multiple, dyad-specific common grounds, and appeal the one relevant to a
particular speaker at a particular time.
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Infants are similarly sensitive to what others have witnessed when producing
language themselves, though by no means are they error-free (see, e.g., Glucksberg &
Krauss, 1967; O’Neill & Holmes, 2002). O’Neill (1996) had 2-year-olds ask their parents
for help in retrieving a toy that was out of reach. After an infant was presented with a toy,
it was placed in one of two containers on a shelf. If her parent was absent or had her eyes
and ears closed during the presentation and hiding phases, the infant used more
informative gestures and verbal descriptions of the toy or its location when requesting
help in retrieving it. Infants’ requests were less informative when their parents had
witnessed the toy presentation and hiding.
Further evidence for this early pragmatic awareness in production comes from a
study by Serratrice (2005) of children learning null-argument languages. These languages
permit the omission of subject- and object-arguments when the discourse context renders
them redundant. Two-year-olds appropriately modified their speech according to when
this information was optional or obligatory, again demonstrating speaker-specific
considerations in language production.
Collectively, these findings demonstrate that social cues are used early in
ontogeny to interpret otherwise ambiguous language (Ganea & Saylor, 2007; Moll &
Tomasello, 2007), and to tailor speech to specific addressees (Matthews et al., 2006;
Salomo et al., 2010; Serratrice, 2005). Importantly, the earliest instances of this ability
rely on the intersubjectivity of the experiences from which information is garnered. That
is, in the earliest months of the second year of life joint engagement with another
facilitates infants’ ability to track what the other has witnessed, done or discussed.
Through triadic interactions between herself, persons, and objects, an infant builds a
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common ground unique to each of her interlocutors that can later be consulted to clarify
ambiguous speech (Moll & Kadipasaoglu, 2013; Tomasello, 2008).
In the absence of such cues from a common ground, one can look instead to her
physical surroundings for guides to disambiguate indefinite speech. While the social
perspective-taking abilities discussed above emerge around their first birthday, infants
only begin to successfully take another’s visual perspective between 2 and 3 years of age
(Moll & Kadipasaoglu, 2013). In a level 1 visual perspective-taking task, Masangkay et
al. (1974) found that 2- and 3-year-old children knew what was simultaneously visible to
themselves and to an adult, though the content of their visual perception was distinct. A
card with different images printed on either side (e.g., a dog and a cat) was held up
between the infant and adult. When asked what she could see and what the adult could
see, the infant correctly named the respective images on each side of the card.
Moll and Tomasello (2006) compared the performances of 18- and 24-month-olds
on a level 1 visual perspective-taking task. An adult entered a room explicitly searching
for an object and asked the infant to help him find it. Of two objects in the room, one was
mutually visible to infant and the adult, while the other was blocked from the adult’s
perspective by a barrier. Only the older infants showed a preference for handing the adult
the object that was hidden from his view. Thus, along with the awareness that one
searches for what they cannot see, 24-month-olds understood how the adult’s spatial
relation to the barrier affected his visual access to the object. Younger infants, by
contrast, had not yet developed this understanding and showed no preference for the
occluded object.
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In a study that directly compared infants’ social and visual perspective-taking
skills, Matthews et al. (2006) had 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds watched animated scenes in
which a character performed an action (e.g., a clown jumping) either with an adult, or
alone while the adult was behind the screen and unable to see the video. When the adult
asked the child what happened in the video, 3- and 4-year-olds were significantly more
likely to use more descriptive referring expressions (e.g., full nouns). Conversely, when
the adult had also watched the video, they tended to use pronouns or a null reference
(e.g., a verb alone). Two-year-olds, by contrast, showed no significant preference for
more or less informative responses between the two conditions. Thus, the perceptual
availability for the addressee did not appear to factor into the youngest children’s choice
of referring expressions.
In a second study, Matthews et al. (2006) used the same design but now
manipulated whether the intended referents were part of an adult’s prior discourse. In one
condition, a second adult mentioned the character (e.g. “the clown”) after overhearing the
first adult describing the video to the child. In the other condition, the second adult had
not overheard and asked about what happened in the video without mentioning the
character. In this study, 2-year-olds and older children both responded with more
informative referring expressions when the second adult had not previously mentioned
the character.
These studies illustrate the developmental lag between social and visual
perspective-taking skills. The immediate accessibility of perceptual information suggests
it is the easiest and, consequently, earliest way in which speech is disambiguated (Clark
& Marshall, 1981). As empirical findings reveal, however, it is later in the second year of
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life that children begin to understand what knowledge is and is not afforded by physical
co-presence. Infants more readily track others’ experiential records, an ability that is
facilitated by their own joint engagement. Indeed, young children are motivated to such
an extent by this propensity for attention to social cues that at times it can even lead to
communicative error. The mere presence of another can lead infants to overestimate the
amount of shared perceptual information (Glucksberg & Krauss, 1967) or the extent to
which objects were mutually familiar through engagement (Moll, Carpenter, &
Tomasello, 2010).
The overestimation of shared knowledge or perception invoked by the presence of
another has been found in older children and adults, as well (Epley, Morewedge, &
Keysar, 2004; Keysar, 2007; Keysar, Lin, & Barr, 2003; Surtees & Apperly, 2012).
Indeed, though visual perspective-taking skills emerge between the second and third
years of life, older children’s and even adults’ performances on related tasks are not
error-free.
Keysar, Barr, Balin, and Brauner (2000) introduced adult participants to a
referential communication game involving a vertical grid containing several objects. All
of the objects were visible from the participant’s side. From the other side, where a
“director” sat, some of the objects were occluded from view. The director instructed each
participant to move particular objects to different locations on the grid, using descriptions
that often fit a hidden object better than a mutually visible alternative. For example, when
the director referenced the small candle, this may have applied to a mutually 2-inch-high
candle that was small relative to a 3-inch-high candle that was also mutually visible. But
from the participant’s perspective, the request could also have applied to a 1-inch-high
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candle that she, but not the director, could see. Though participants were aware of the
director’s ignorance of the 1-inch-high candle, their implicit (gaze fixations) as well as
explicit (reaching) responses suggested that adults nonetheless often considered it a
potential referent. Thus, privileged ground information tended to impose upon the
interpretations of others’ speech, indicating continued egocentric interference with visual
perspective-taking, even in adulthood.
Using a similar task, Epley, Morewedge, and Keysar (2004) compared adults’
performances to the performances of children between the ages of 4-12 years. Eye-
tracking data revealed that adults and children both initially interpret ambiguous
references egocentrically, considering objects in their privileged ground before adjusting
these interpretations in consideration of common ground information. Adults were,
however, better at correcting these initial, implicit judgments when actually reaching for
objects to move around the grid. Nonetheless, both adults and children appear equivalent
in their failure to immediately constrain their interpretation of other’s speech according to
what the other can presently see.
The conclusions of Epley et al. (2004) were challenged, however, by another
study using a modified version of the referential communication task. Nadig and Sedivy
(2002) looked at 5- and 6-year-olds’ production and comprehension of requests relative
to their visual common ground with an interlocutor. The children sat on one side of a
four-compartment shelf, from which all four compartments were visible. An adult partner
sat across from them and could only see three of the compartments. In the production
task, the children described a target object to the adult. In the common ground condition,
both the target object and another object of the same kind but differing in size (e.g., a tall
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glass and a short glass) were visible to both the child and the adult, necessitating the use
of an adjective to specify the intended referent. In the privileged ground condition, the
contrasting object was placed in the hidden compartment, making the use of an adjective
redundant from the adult’s point of view. In the comprehension task, the design was
identical but the child and adult reversed roles. The adult now requested an object (e.g.,
“the glass”) and the child had to choose one of the four objects on the shelf.
This design differed from previous studies (e.g., Keysar et al., 2000) in an
important respect: in previous studies, the object in the participant’s privileged ground
was a better fit to the request than the object in the common ground. That is, when a
request was made for, e.g., “the small candle”, the hidden candle was actually smaller
than the mutually visible small candle. Thus, the item in the privileged ground had an
advantage in competing for identification as the intended referent. Nadig and Sedivy
(2002) avoided this bias for the privileged ground object by having the adult use
unmodified nouns to make requests in the comprehension task. Thus, although the target
and contrasting objects differed in size, the requests applied equally well to both. The
results revealed that at 5 years of age, children used visual common ground information
early in the processing stages when interpreting requests, as well as when they produced
speech for another.
The present study is a modified version of these referential communication tasks
(e.g., Nadig & Sedivy, 2002) and goes beyond previous work in two respects. First, we
examined the children’s interpretations of requests made in three different contexts. In all
three contexts, an experimenter ambiguously requested an object and the child had to
select one of four possible referents. In one condition, the experimenter jointly engaged
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with the child with each object before making the request (Prior Engagement Condition).
In another condition, the experimenter first emphasized her visual access to the otherwise
unfamiliar object that she requested (Visual Condition). Finally, in another condition the
experimenter requested an object by expressing need for an object with a particular
feature (Pragmatic Condition).
It is the Pragmatic Condition that distinguishes the present study most notably
from previous work. Studies of reference resolution, as in the studies described above,
typically construct situations in which reference is made to objects whose presence is
known to the speaker, regardless of whether their location is also known. In the present
study, requests in the Pragmatic Condition are not necessarily made with a known
referent in mind. Rather, the child was to select the object that was most helpful given the
experimenter’s need, despite her ignorance as to its location or existence.
It has been shown that young infants are capable to cooperate in the manner that
is called for by this condition. Indirect studies of infants’ ability to respond helpfully to
adults’ ambiguous requests have found that by 2 years of age, they can use cues from the
adult’s previous expression of preference (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997), her prior
engagement with objects and subsequent familiarity with them vs. excitement over novel
objects (Tomasello & Haberl, 2003), and her prior discourse (Ganea & Saylor, 2007;
Matthews, et al., 2006).
Grosse, Moll, and Tomasello (2010) studied 21-month-olds’ understanding of the
cooperative logic of requests by having an adult ambiguously request objects from them.
One potential referent was within reaching distance of the adult and a second potential
referent was across the room from her. When the adult’s hands were unoccupied, infants
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were more likely to retrieve the object from across the room. No significant difference
was found between which objects infants retrieved when the adult’s hands were
occupied. This suggests that infants were aware that the “hands-free” adult would not ask
for help if her desired object was within easy reach, though such a request might be
reasonable if her hands were occupied. Infants thus exhibited a basic knowledge of the
implicit communicative understanding between interlocutors that requests are made when
one cannot accomplish a goal more easily herself (Grice, 1975).
Second, the participants in this study are younger than those in previous studies.
By the time they are 3 years old, infants have demonstrated an understanding of
cooperative logic of requests called for by the present study’s Pragmatic Condition
(Grosse, Moll, & Tomasello, 2010) and the social and visual perspective-takings skills
necessary for present study’s Prior Engagement and Visual Conditions (Matthews et al.,
2006; Moll & Tomasello, 2006; Saylor & Ganea, 2007). Still older children have
performed successfully in referential communication tasks (Nadig & Sedivy, 2002). The
current task has been adapted for younger participants, for example by using fewer
compartments and formulating simpler requests. This study thus aimed to tease apart
three aspects of perspective-taking and examines children’s relative proficiency with each
at an even earlier time in development.
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Chapter 2: Experiment
In this experiment, 3.5-year-old children were presented with a
perspective-taking task. The child sat in front of a shelf with four compartments (2 x 2),
each containing one object. Three of the objects differed on one dimension only: height,
size, or length (e.g., three brown sticks differing solely in length). The fourth object was
an entirely different, distractor, object. An adult looked at the shelf from the opposite side
from which two diagonally positioned compartments were visually occluded. One of
them contained the distractor; the other contained the x-est (e.g., longest, tallest etc.)
object. She ambiguously requested an object from the child, with the form of the question
differing between conditions.
In one condition, the Visual Condition, the adult requested an object visible to
her (“Oh, look! I see a long stick!”). Children had to take her visual perspective and rule
out the, e.g., longest of three sticks because the adult could not see it. In the Pragmatic
Condition, the adult expressed a need for, e.g., a “really long stick”. In this condition,
children should ignore what the adult can see and simply choose whichever object in the
shelf beset matches the expression. Thus, they should select, e.g., longest stick. In the
Prior Engagement Condition, the adult and the child had placed all four objects inside
the shelf together prior to the adult’s request. Here also, the child should ignore the fact
that the adult is not able to see the, e.g. longest stick, because its location was mutually
known.
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Method
Participants
Participants were 18 (9 females) 3.5-year-old children (M = 44;29, range = 39;12-
49;16) from a large metropolitan city in the United States. Ten of them were recruited
through the university’s database of children whose parents volunteered to have their
child participate in developmental studies. These children were tested at the University’s
laboratory. The remaining eight children were recruited via preschools and were tested
there. One additional child was tested but excluded from the final sample due to
experimenter error. According to parental report, fifteen children were monolingual
English speakers and three were bilingual.
Materials and Design
Warm-up and distractor materials. In order to ‘warm up’ with the child, Experimenter 1
(E1) and Experimenter 2 (E2) drew pictures with the child on construction paper using
markers and crayons. A puzzle with magnetic pieces (30 cm x 25 cm x 1.3 cm) was used
between conditions (after every third trial) to distract the child from the previous
dialogue.
Test materials. Two shelves (58 cm x 43 cm x 13 cm) with four compartments (two on
top of each other and two side-by-side, each measuring 30 cm x 23 cm x 10 cm) were
used. For one shelf, the top left and bottom right compartments were blocked from one
side. For the other shelf, the bottom left and top right compartments were blocked from
one side. Half of the children were randomly assigned to either shelf.
Four objects were used to demonstrate the effect of the occluded compartments
before the test. These were a grey whale, a turtle, a dolphin, and toy car (sizes ranged
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between 10 cm x 8 cm x 5 cm and 15 cm x 10 cm x 5 cm). For the test, there were three
groups of objects, each consisting in three sets of three objects. The groups were defined
by the dimension on which the objects in a set varied: size, height, or length. In the size
group, there was a set of horses, a set of boxes, and a set of balls. Objects within each set
were qualitatively identical except for a difference in size. Thus, e.g., the box set
consisted in a small, medium, and large box. The height group contained a set of paper
trees, a set of cups, and a set of rectangular blocks. The length group contained a set of
trains, a set of Popsicle sticks, and a set of crayons. Across groups, the smallest objects
ranged in size between 5 cm x 5 cm x 2 cm and 13 cm x 14 cm x 9 cm; the medium
objects ranged between 10 cm x 5 cm x 2.5 cm and 18 cm x 17 cm x 10 cm; and the
biggest objects between 13 cm x 13 cm x 10 cm and 23 cm x 18 cm x 8 cm.
A fourth distractor object, which looked entirely different, was added to each set.
These were a plastic seal, sheep, bear, whale, shark, and octopus, a red triangular block, a
blue doll hat, and a white doll shoe (with sizes ranging between 8 cm x 8 cm x 2.5 cm
and 15 cm x 10 cm x 5 cm). The temporal order of distractor items was kept constant,
regardless of the order in which the sets were presented, which was counterbalanced
across children. A gift bag (33 cm x 25 cm x 13 cm) was used for children to place the
selected object inside.
Design. The experiment followed a 2 (occluder position) x 2 (requested object size: “big”
v. “small”) x 3 (condition: Pragmatic vs. Visual vs. Prior Engagement) design, with
occluder position as between-subjects factor and requested object size and condition as
within-subjects factors.
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Each child was presented with three trials of each of the three conditions, yielding
a total of 9 trials. The order of condition, as well as the order of object groups (e.g.,
heightà lengthàsize), and the order of object sets within the groups (e.g.,
blocksàtreesàcups) was counterbalanced. The target position (e.g., top left) varied
across trials as a function of condition.
Procedure
Testing took place in a room in the laboratory or in a quiet room in the child’s
preschool. Children were tested individually in a single session lasting about 20 minutes.
For four of the children, a parent or teacher was present in the room. To exclude the
possibility of any interference, she was seated behind the child and instructed to remain
silent throughout the study. Figure 1 depicts the experimental setup in the room.
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Figure 1. Aerial view of the experimental set-up.
The child, E1 and E2 sat down on the floor and drew pictures on construction
paper until the child was acclimated to the situation. The actual experiment began when
E1 announced that she had to go to another room and left. E2 then instructed the child to
take a seat at a table, on which the shelf was located. The four compartments contained
the demonstration objects. From the child’s perspective, all of the objects were visible
(see Figure 2a). E2 said, “Look, from here, you can see all of the toys”, pointing to each
of the four objects. Then she led the child to the opposite side of the table, from which
perspective, the objects in two diagonal compartments were occluded (see Figure 2b). E2
indicated that, “from here, you can only see this one [points at one visible object] and this
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one [points at other visible object].” The child then went back around the table to her
original position, i.e. the side of the table from which all objects were visible.

Figure 2. View of shelf with demo objects from (a) the child’s view, and (b) E1’s view.
At this point, E2 introduced the game to the child, and told her that upon E1’s
return, E1 will ask the child for one of the objects in the shelf. E2 instructed the child to
always choose just one object and place it in the bag located 50 cm to the child’s right.
To demonstrate the game, E2 positioned herself near the door (see E1’s position in Figure
1) and asked the child to place “the car” into the bag. After this demonstration, E2
removed the objects and announced that E1 is about to return—which marked the
beginning of the first trial. What happened next depended on condition.
In the Prior Engagement Condition, E1entered the room and brought out the
first set of objects, e.g., the boxes, saying to the child “Let’s put these up together”. E1
and the child then jointly placed the objects in their respective compartments in the shelf,
resulting in an array as shown in Figure 3a. (E1 referred to the objects by using
demonstratives, such as “this one”, and never used descriptive labels, such as “the small
box”.) E1 walked across the room and positioned herself by the door, from where the
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visual array appeared as shown in Figure 3b, with the smallest box occluded. From this
position, E1 then made the following request, “I want the [adjective, e.g., small,] [noun,
e.g., box]. Can you put the small box in the bag for me?” While uttering all requests, E1
looked at the center of the shelf where the four compartments meet, so, gaze direction
was not indicative of the correct response. Despite the fact that the smallest box was
hidden from E1’s view, this object was nonetheless the intended referent because it was
part of E1’s and the child’s prior engagement with the objects. After the child chose an
object and placed it in the bag, E1 removed the remaining objects from the shelf. She and
the child then jointly placed the next set of objects on the shelf and the procedure was
repeated as above.
In the Pragmatic Condition she said, e.g., “I need a really big box,” followed by
a request, “Can you put the biggest box in the bag for me?” In this condition, the object
that best satisfied E1’s request (e.g., the biggest box) was always hidden from her view.
Thus, if E1 requested the biggest box, only the small and medium-sized boxes were
mutually visible, and the biggest box (and the distractor) were visible only from the
child’s perspective. As in the Prior Engagement Condition, the target was the hidden,
biggest box. From E1’s perspective, the medium-sized box appeared to be the biggest and
thus was potentially the referent of her request. However, given the need expressed in the
form of the request, the most cooperative response was for the child to give her the actual
biggest box though it was hidden from E1’s view.
The Visual Condition differed from both other conditions in that the target object
was always the medium-sized object, and always mutually visible. E1 entered the room
and said, e.g., “Oh, look! I see a big box! Can you put the big box in the bag for me?”
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This was accompanied by a quick, ambiguous point. Only the small and medium-sized
boxes were visible to E1, while the child also saw the big box and distractor. Because this
request emphasized E1’s visual perception of the object of her request, the target was not
the occluded biggest box. Instead, the objectively best-fitting referent was to be ignored
in favor of the box that was biggest relative to E1’s perspective.

Figure 3. View of shelf when E1 asks for “the short cup” from (a) the child’s view, and
(b) E1’s view.

Each trial ended when the child placed an object in the bag. After the last trial of
each of the first two conditions, E1, E2, and the child played with a fishing puzzle for
approximately 2-3 minutes. This was in order to discourage the child from habituating to
a particular response (e.g., continuing to always select the biggest or smallest objects
after the Pragmatic or Prior Engagement Condition), and to make the upcoming, novel
form of request more salient. If the next condition was the Visual or the Pragmatic
Condition, E1 announced that she was going to the other room and left. E2 then directed
the child back to the table and put new objects in the compartments. If the next condition
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was the Prior Engagement Condition, E1 directed the child back to the table and retrieved
the next set of objects to be jointly placed on the shelf.
Coding and Reliability
E2 coded which objects the child chose based on live judgment during test trials.
Each session was also recorded with cameras from two different angles, and these
recordings were viewed after sessions to confirm the accuracy of the initial coding. If the
child reached for or touched one object but ultimately chose a different one to put in the
bag, the latter was coded as the chosen. However, “first touch” responses were also coded
for every trial. For each subject, the proportion of correct responses for each trial, the
proportion of correct first touches, as well as the proportion of responses that were the
perceptually-best fitting object and the proportion of responses that were the medium-
sized object were calculated.
To assess inter-rater reliability, a second coder who was unaware of condition and
the hypothesis of the experiment, coded a randomly selected sample of five (28%)
children. These trials were coded for the children’s final chosen object and for first touch
responses. The two raters disagreed on 2 out of 45 trials, both regarding the final choice a
child made and first touch. In both cases, Cohen’s Kappa was .93. Thus, excellent
reliability was achieved.
Results and Discussion
There was no effect of gender (p = .655), spatial position of the target (p = .137),
or order of condition (p = .995). Figure 4 shows the mean proportion of correct responses
along with standard errors in each condition. Children largely responded correctly in the
Prior Engagement (M = .85, SE = .07) and Pragmatic (M = .8, SE = .07) conditions by
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choosing the object that was the perceptual best fit to E1’s ambiguous request. They also
tended to choose the perceptual best fit in the Visual Condition, in which such a response
was not correct, resulting in a low mean proportion of correct responses (M = .16, SE =
.06).

Figure 4. Mean proportion of correct selection responses in Prior Engagement, Visual,
and Pragmatic Conditions.

We also looked at the effect of condition on first touch response measures. This
was in order to see if children’s automatic or implicit interpretation of the ambiguous
request was manifest in their initial reach, even if they subsequently modified their
actions when making the final object selection. Of particular interest was whether or not a
difference would emerge between first touch and final choice in the Visual Condition.
This would have indicated that despite their relatively poor performance in this condition,
children were initially processing the other’s visual perspective. The subsequent error in
choice may have been a result of their inability to override their own perspective when
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making the final selection. However, the mean proportions of correct first touch
responses mimicked the target selection outcomes (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Mean proportion of correct first touch responses in Prior Engagement, Visual,
and Pragmatic conditions.

A one-way repeated measures ANOVA assessed the significance of differences
between conditions. The initial analyses was showed no effect of gender and no
interaction effect of condition x order of condition (p = .227). Subsequent analyses
therefore used only condition as the within-subjects factor, for which a main effect of
condition was found, F(2, 34) = 38.5, p < .000. Pairwise comparisons (see Table 1)
revealed that the mean proportion of correct responses in the Visual Condition was
significantly lower than in both the Prior Engagement Condition and Pragmatic
Condition. No significant differences were found between the Prior Engagement and
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Pragmatic Conditions. Thus, the Visual Condition presented a unique challenge for
children. This condition required them to ignore what was objectively the most
appropriate response to the other’s request, and consider only the objects that were
mutually visible to themselves and the other. This proved to be more difficult than the
tasks in the other conditions, in which social rather than visual perspective-taking was
needed.
Table 1

Results of Pairwise Comparisons Test for Significant Differences Between Conditions

This goes contrary to the pervasive idea that visual perspective-taking is the
fundamental and therefore “easiest” form of perspective-taking, upon which social forms
are modeled. Intuitively, it seems that because of the immediate availability of visual
information, children will use this information with relative ease as necessary to interpret
another’s ambiguous request. That is, children should readily attend to the other’s visuo-
spatial relation to objects in the room and compute what is and is not perceptually
available to him. At a cursory glance, it seems that this computation is an easier task in
comparison to tracking another’s experiential record or responding to one’s need or
desire for an object that she cannot presently see, or that she may not know exists at all.
Means (with SEs in parentheses) p values for comparisons between conditions
Condition Visual Prior
Engagement
Pragmatic Visual vs.
Pragmatic
Visual vs.
Prior
Engagement
Pragmatic vs.
Prior
Engagement
Correct
Response
.16 ± .06 .85 ± .07 .8 ± .07 p < .001 p < .001 p = 1
Note: p values have been Bonferroni corrected

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However, empirical work has shown that prior to proficiency in visual
perspective-taking tasks, children can attend to and use information about another’s
desires, needs, or familiarity to respond to ambiguous requests, though these features are
not directly observable in one’s environment. The results of the current study provide
further support for this notion.
There are, however, limitations to this interpretation. Consistent selection of the
mutually visible target objects in the Visual Condition would have provided evidence of
visual perspective-taking skills. Moreover, it would have bolstered the interpretation of
their good performance in the other two conditions. It is possible that correct responses in
the Pragmatic and Prior Engagement Conditions are attributable to children’s ability to
consider E1’s needs or track her familiarity with the objects. However, similarly
successful performance in the Visual Condition would have provided critical evidence of
these social perspective-taking skills by showing that they can be overridden when
necessary. Without such evidence, argument could be made for the alternative
explanation that children simply chose objects according to their own perspective without
consideration of the other’s need or experiential record. According to this view, when
asked for, e.g., the biggest box in the Pragmatic Condition, the child did not ignore her
knowledge of what was mutually visible (in this case, the medium box) and choose the
actual biggest box because that was optimally helpful for the other. Rather, she chose the
biggest box because it was the perceptual best fit according to her own view.
There is plentiful data demonstrating children’s early competence with social cues
to support our interpretation that their performance on the Pragmatic and Prior
Engagement Conditions is attributable to social perspective-taking skills. Regardless, the
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ambiguity of the current results motivates the need for follow-up studies to reinforce our
conclusion. The poor performance in the Visual Condition may be because children of
the current age group have not yet acquired the visual perspective-taking skills needed to
succeed. An identical study with older children might see improved performance, thus
disconfirming the egocentric interpretation of the current results.
Another possibility is that children of the age group we tested do have nascent
visual perspective-taking skills. This capacity may only be sensitive to quite explicit
signals that the child should attend to visuo-spatial information. In this case, a follow-up
study in which the Visual Condition requests are even more obviously about the mutually
visible object would see better performance in this condition.
A final consideration concerns different ways of constructing control conditions.
In this study, the three conditions served as controls for one another. Another possibility
would be to have a separate control condition for each one of the experimental
conditions, Prior, Pragmatic and Visual. In these control conditions, the exact same
request would be uttered; however, all four compartments would be visible to the child
participant and the adult uttering the request.
Any of these adjustments would provide opportunity to further elucidate the
phenomenon tested in the current study. At any rate, our data confirm the primacy of
social over visual perspective-taking in ontogeny. Moreover, this study moves the
investigation of early perspective-taking using the referential communication paradigm in
a more promising direction, because it leaves behind the assumption that speakers
generally requests things that they can currently see. Future studies conducted with a
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broadened scope of referential acts may therefore lead to a more complete understanding
of the earliest instances of perspective-taking in development.

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Studies of visual perspective-taking have been built on the assumption that speakers refer only to objects that are located in their visual field. However, everyday speech is filled with references, including requests, to objects that are outside of one’s view. In the present study, eighteen 3.5-year-old children participated in a referential communication task that required them to interpret requests made both for objects in and out of the speaker’s visual field. More specifically, only in one condition (Visual Condition) did the speaker request an object that she could actually see. In the other two conditions, the child had to consider what the speaker needed (Pragmatic Condition), and what the speaker wanted given her familiarity with or ignorance of objects (Prior Engagement Condition). Children were successful in the Pragmatic Condition and Prior Engagement Condition, but showed poor performance in the Visual Condition. This pattern of findings supports the idea that children come to understand references to objects that are mutually known or based on pragmatic considerations before they learn to take into account another’s visuo-spatial perspective (Moll & Kadipasaoglu, 2013). A broadened scope of referential acts that includes references to non-visible objects in future studies may lead to a more complete picture of early perspective-taking skills.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kadipasaoglu, Derya (author)

Core Title Children's use of social and visual perspective-taking in reference resolution

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Psychology

Publication Date 10/06/2014

Defense Date 10/06/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Child development,OAI-PMH Harvest,perspective-taking,Psychology,social,visual

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Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Moll, Henrike (committee chair), Manis, Franklin R. (committee member), Schwartz, David (committee member)

Creator Email derya.kadipas@gmail.com

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