Michael Hainsworth

Turns out those punk kids have a reason for ignoring your demand to get off your lawn: their brains aren’t developed enough.

University College in London has published a study that shows children have difficulty adopting the viewpoint of others. And while this improves with age, teens still have trouble putting themselves in your shoes. When kids under 4 watch two puppets put a marble in a box, researchers took one puppet away. The other puppet takes the marble out of the box and puts it in a bag. The children think the returning puppet will look in the bag — revealing they can’t comprehend that the second puppet only “knows” what it’s seen.

Advance this concept of “what others see” to those 7 to 27:

A simple computer game reveals how able volunteers are to put themselves on the shoes of others. Click the link below to see the frames in full detail (Image: Iroise Dumontheil/Developmental Science)

Test subjects – 179 females ranging in age from 7 to 27 – saw a bookshelf with a variety of different sized balls and other objects on four different rows. Some of the objects sit in front of opaque backgrounds, obscured to someone standing on the other side of the shelf, while some sit in front of a see-through background.

Participants are asked to adopt the perspective of a man standing on the other side of the shelf and move the small ball to the left, using a mouse. In a typical test, a golf ball and tennis ball are both visible to the participant, but the golf ball is obscured from the point of view of the observer. The correct response, then, is to move the tennis ball.

75% of the time, kids under 10 moved the wrong ball. 10 to 13 year olds didn’t do much better — and even teenagers got it wrong 66% of the time. Adults got it wrong less than 50% of the time.

Story: New Scientist
Source: Developmental Science