Perspective Taking

Definition

The word perspective refers to the appearance of viewed objects with regard to their relative position and distance from the viewer and has its roots in the Latin perspicere (to look through) or perspectiva ars (the art/science of optics). Thus, in a literal interpretation, perspective refers to a visuospatial representation. Perspective taking hence describes the act of mentally representing a visual experience that is different from one’s own current experience—for example, that of another person. However, perspective taking can also involve imagining standing in another viewpoint oneself, without another observer or any social component. Nevertheless, perspective taking has often been studied using other people—or sometimes puppets—as placeholders to indicate the to-be-imagined perspective.

Beyond this original visuospatial context, the term perspective taking has been applied to other mental contents in psychological literature. For example, cognitive perspective taking has been used to refer to the representation of other persons’ cognitive states, such as beliefs, motives, or goals. The terms emotional or affective perspective taking go a step further and imply empathic thoughts and the ability to feel for someone else. However, these terms often are not very precisely defined, and the distinction to other concepts such as theory of mind (i.e., the understanding that other people have beliefs, desires, and intentions different from one’s own) or empathy is unclear. In this respect, an important characteristic of perspective taking is that the observer does not falsely believe that the observer is actually standing in a different vantage point. By analogy, emotional perspective taking does not necessarily elicit empathic feelings and the observer may not actually feel what the other person is feeling. This characteristic may be a distinguishing factor that delineates emotional perspective taking from (some definitions of) empathy.

Typology

In the developmental literature, a distinction between Level 1 and Level 2 perspective-taking abilities has been widely established, based on recurrent observations that young children’s performance differs rather drastically between [Page 1627]various perspective-taking tasks that presumably vary in their cognitive demands.

Level 1 perspective taking describes the inference that another person’s perceptual experience may be different from one’s own. For example, if a piece of cardboard is held vertically between the child and another observer, and a toy is placed on the child’s side of the cardboard, does the child understand that the other observer cannot see the toy because the cardboard prevents visual access? Under favorable conditions, children as young as 3 years old answer correctly that the other observer cannot see the toy despite the fact that they themselves can see it. Moreover, there is evidence from reaching and looking time studies that even infants are able to make such inferences. Also, nonhuman animals have been shown to be sensitive to what their conspecifics are able to perceive in food competition contexts, preferentially targeting hidden food that a dominant competitor could not see over food that was visible to the competitor. Research with human adults has further suggested that Level 1 perspective taking is an automatized process, requiring only a minimal amount of cognitive control. In fact, in some of these tasks, the correct answer can be inferred by following the observer’s line of sight and determining whether this path is obstructed or not, which greatly reduces the cognitive demands. However, a necessary cognitive precondition for Level 1 perspective taking is the ability to think about the world as independent from the self and to discard the egocentric idea that everyone perceives, thinks, and knows the same as oneself.

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