Poster #187 - Does Similarity to a Communicative Partner Influence Children's Perspective-Taking?

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Perspective-taking is essential for effectively communicating with others. Even children are able to take another’s perspective to resolve ambiguous communication (Nilsen & Graham, 2009). Social experiences such as exposure to multiple languages (Fan & Liberman et al., 2015) and growing up in a collectivistic culture (Wu & Keysar, 2007) seem to improve perspective-taking in a communicative context. Similarity to a communicative partner can sometimes foster effective communication (Greenaway et al., 2015). However, closeness or similarity to a communicative partner may in fact decrease perspective-taking, since overestimating shared knowledge can lead to egocentric errors (Savitsky et al., 2011). The current study aims to remove the social experience of adults by studying how similarity to a communicative partner influences perspective-taking in children.
Forty-eight 4- and 6-year-olds played a game which required them to take their partner’s perspective (Fan & Liberman et al., 2015; Keysar et al., 2000). The task used a 4x4 shelf with four slots occluded to the partner, but visible to the child. Children received ambiguous instructions from the partner to move an object in the shelf (e.g. dinosaur), however there was often a second object in one of the occluded slots (e.g., a different coloured dinosaur) which matched the instruction. Children needed to use perspective-taking to select the dinosaur that their partner could also see. Children played one round of the game with a similar partner, and another round with a dissimilar partner (order counterbalanced). Similarity was manipulated by presenting facts about each partner’s geographic location (lives in the same city or lives in a faraway city), accent, and knowledge (or absence of knowledge) of a book or tv program the child enjoys. We coded children’s final object selection and which object children looked to first after the instruction. Finally, children were asked to indicate their similarity to each communicative partner and who they would prefer to play with again.
There were no age differences, so analyses are collapsed across age. Although there were no significant differences in correct reaches or first looks based on the partner’s manipulated similarity, post-hoc analyses comparing children’s performance with their preferred vs. their less preferred partner were in line with the hypothesized results. Children made significantly more first looks to the correct object with the less preferred partner (t(47)=2.33, p=.024), and a greater number of children performed better (i.e., made more correct reaches) when playing with their less preferred partner (n=24) than their preferred partner (n=13), though this trend did not reach significance (p=.099). Consistent with findings in adults (Savitsky et al., 2011), these results suggest that children’s perspective-taking may be better when interacting with a person they feel less close to.
Our findings indicate that children’s liking of their communicative partner may be more likely to lead to egocentric behaviour in a perspective-taking task than similarity, even though similarity tends to be associated with broader shared knowledge. We are investigating the influence of these different factors on communicative perspective-taking in ongoing work.

Authors

• Laura Anderson, Victoria University of Wellington
  Presenting Author

• Zoe Liberman, University of California Santa Barbara
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alia Martin, Victoria University of Wellington
  Non-Presenting Author