Teaching perspective-taking skills to typically developing children through derived relational responding.

Abstract

Abstract Perspective-taking is an ability that requires a child to emit a selection response of informational states in himself or herself and in others. This study used an extended version of the Barnes-Holmes protocol developed in a series of studies by McHugh, Barnes-Holmes, and Barnes-Holmes (2004) to teach typically developing children between the ages of 6-11 perspective-taking skills. The present demonstrational study used a multiple probe design to evaluate the participants' abilities to demonstrate a number of simple and complex relations, and examined both relation type and relational complexity. We also tested for generalization of perspective taking to new stimuli and real-world conversational topics. Results demonstrate that the capacity to alter perspectives can be established by means of a history of reinforced relational responding. Keywords: Perspective-taking, Relational Frame Theory, Theory of Mind, stimulus generalization, response generalization. ********** Perspective-taking is a phenomenon described in the developmental literature that requires a child to display knowledge of informational states in himself or herself and in others (Barnes-Holmes, Hayes, Dymond, & O'Hara, 2001). A simple example of a child taking another's perspective occurs when, for instance, a child discriminates that when sitting in a different chair from which he is sitting in now, an object will look different from that different viewpoint. Perspective-taking skills are said by developmental psychologists to benefit children in their complex reasoning abilities. In addition, having the ability to take another person's perspective is an important social skill that children need in order to make and sustain friendships. There have been a multitude of studies conducted concerning perspective-taking skills in children. The majority of these studies have focused on the age at which children develop these skills. For example, Newcombe and Huttenlocher (1992) discussed the developmental psychologist Piaget's view on perspective taking. Piaget did not believe that these skills are developed in children before the age of 9-10 because of children's tendency to be egocentric, meaning that children have problems realizing that other people see things in different ways than themselves. Specifically, Piaget believed that children couldn't develop perspective-taking skills because they code spatial location differently from adults. For example, Piaget thought that children use a topographical system of spatial representation. Children code relationships through touching or proximity, whereas adults use metric coding of distance, such as coding the position of objects as being in the vicinity of landmarks. Huttenlocher and Presson (1979), however, argued that this lack of perspective-taking in children is not due to the children's difficulty with coding spatial locations, but rather conflict between actual and imagined frames of reference. Instead of relying on these frames of reference as in Piaget's studies, these authors asked preschoolers what object occupied a specified location with respect to a hypothetical observer, and this led to improved performance. The Newcombe and Huttenlocher (1992) study extended the results of the Huttenlocher and Presson study. The results clearly showed that the preschool children in their study could indicate locations relative to another person. Surprisingly, although young children still made egocentric errors, it is still quite notable that 3-year old performance was considerably above chance. Other studies conducted on perspective taking focused on the different aspects of this skill. Dixon and Moore (1990) for example, examined the difference between the two situations in which perspective taking can be seen. The authors labeled these two situations as Information effect--when the subject and the other person have contrasting information, and the Weighting effect--when the subject and the other person have the same information but use that information differently when deciding their own separate judgments. …