Visual Perspective-taking Task Research Articles

Visual Perspective Taking as a Measure of Working Memory in Participants With Autism

There is mounting evidence that people with autism have executive function deficits and that those deficits are linked to the social impairment characteristic of autism. Bennetto et al. Child Dev.(1996) 67: 1817–1835 suggest that, more specifically, people with autism may have a deficit in working memory. This hypothesis was tested using a visual perspective-taking task whose working memory load could be systematically varied. The performance of participants with autism on this task was significantly worse than that of the control participants.

Eye‐direction detection: A dissociation between geometric and joint attention skills in autism

This study examined differences between children with autism and control children in the ability to follow another person's direction of gaze. In Expt 1, children with autism, Down syndrome and normally developing children were given two tasks. The gaze monitoring task (GMT) measured the child's spontaneous tendency to follow gaze direction in response to another person's change of head and eye movement. The visual perspective taking task (VPT) measured the child's ability to compute and report what the other person was looking at, when instructed to do so. Results showed that the majority of Down syndrome and normal children passed both tasks. In contrast, children with autism failed the GMT. This failure could not have been due to a lack of the relevant geometric skill, as they passed the VPT. This geometric skill was examined further in Expt 2, using a fine discrimination task which tested children's ability to discriminate degrees of change in the orientation of gaze. Children with autism were well within their developmental age level on this task. These results indicate a dissociation between (impaired) spontaneous monitoring and (intact) geometric analysis of gaze‐direction.

I, you, me, and autism: An experimental study

The nature of autistic individuals' abnormalities in the use of personal pronouns has been a topic of considerable speculation but little systematic investigation. We tested groups of CA- and verbal MA-matched autistic and nonautistic mentally retarded children and young adults on a series of tasks that involved the comprehension and use of the personal pronouns "I," "you," and "me." All subjects were able to comprehend these pronouns within the test situations, and there were few instances of pronoun reversal. However, autistic subjects were significantly less likely to employ the pronoun "me" in a visual perspective-taking task (when instead they tended to say: 'I can see the . . .'), and lower ability subjects were more likely to use their own proper names rather than personal pronouns in certain photograph-naming tasks. There were also circumstances in which autistic subjects were less likely than controls to employ the pronoun "you" to refer to the experimenter. A high proportion of these autistic subjects were reported to have current difficulties with personal pronouns in their everyday life, and we discuss some alternative interpretations of the results.

Visual perspective-taking in young children: Reduction of egocentric errors by induction of strategy

Children from 4 to 7 years of age were tested on two visual perspective-taking tasks. In one of these, they were asked to generate their own view of a toy house for a puppet “observer.” In the other task, a simple strategy was employed: respondents were asked first to generate their own view of the house for themselves, and then to generate that view for the observer. This strategy reduced the frequency of egocentric errors, to the degree that the performance of the 4-year-old children did not differ from that of the 7-year-olds. Results indicate that nonegocentric visual perspective-taking can be instantiated in young children without physical alteration of the task apparatus employed or of the child’s spatial relation to it.

Visual Perspective-Taking Skills in Children

The present study evaluated the effects of stimulus complexity and rule usage on a visual perspective-taking task. Preschoolers, first, third, and fifth graders, and adults were shown arrays of dolls and performed a series of perspective-taking tasks. Errors decreased with age, and more errors occurred with the more complex visual arrays. A significant number of errors were made in self-view trials, especially by the preschoolers, showing that the ability to relate an array to a pictorial representation of it is not perfect. A conditional probability analysis showed that most egocentric errors were not due to an inability to relate the array to pictorial representations, but rather to a lack of mastery of Flavell's different positions--different views rule. When the array was covered, however, even first graders showed almost perfect mastery of this rule. There were also task effects on the use of Flavell's same position--same view rule: children performed better for a task involving self and other than for 2 others. Response latencies and effects for the observer's relative position provided evidence for a new rule: opposite positions--opposite views. In addition, front and back views of the dolls were significantly easier than the side views, which suggests a role of labeling or stimulus-discrimination skills.

The Emergence of Spatial Perspective Taking: An Information-processing Alternative to Egocentrism

120 children between ages 4 and 8 were administered a set of 4 visual perspective-taking tasks similar to ones employed in previous investigations. It was hypothesized that children's competence with the tasks would be a function of the number and type of spatial relationships embedded in the stimulus displays. 2 kinds of spatial relationships were described: (1) internal relationships--those between objects within a display; and (2) external relationships--those between the display and a frame of reference. Of the 4 task types, type A tasks necessitated awareness of possible variations in external relations, types B and C tasks required both awareness and computation of changes in those external relationships, and type D tasks required simultaneous coordination of internal and external spatial relationships. It was predicted that the tasks would sequence in terms of difficulty level as A less than B, B = C, and C less than D. Analysis of variance results on the obtained data revealed a good fit with the hypothesized predictions. The findings were discussed in terms of an information-processing analysis of children's performance on perspective-taking tasks.