Right-left orientation, mental rotation, and perspective-taking: when can children imagine what people see from their own viewpoint?

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Right-left orientation, mental rotation, and perspective-taking were examined in a group of 406 subjects ranging from 5 to 11 yr. of age with equal numbers of children in each age group. Immediate recognition was not a difficult task as even young children succeeded adequately on the three tasks involving different images. Right-left identification, where right and left terms are used, was harder even for the oldest subjects when associated with mental rotation. When children had to identify which image a person would see from another viewpoint, they succeeded when the person was looking away in the same direction as they were looking. When the person was facing the children (in the opposite direction of "forward"), three different behaviors emerged which indicated absence or presence of mental rotation in perspective-taking. Young subjects chose images as if the figures in the image were seeing from the subject's viewpoint; this percentage diminished slowly across increased ages. As subjects' ages increased, more chose the correct image. Even at 11 years of age, however, only half of the subjects chose correctly. Finally, an equal percentage of subjects among the different age groups understood that the person was seeing a different orientation of the persons but did not associate this with the correct right-left position of the persons on the image. This transition most probably reflects the slow evolution of cognitive processes which determine the way the child will use references to internal or external frameworks. It illustrates as well the passage from egocentrism to geocentrism with the ability to consider viewpoints other than one's own.