Two Trends in the Development of Conceptual Perspective-taking: An Elaboration of the Passive-Active Hypothesis

Two developmental trends in conceptual perspective-taking are proposed and these proposals are used to frame a review of the perspective-taking literature. Perspective-taking competence is described in terms of children's understanding of relations between mental states and conditions that influence or determine mental states. The two proposed developmental trends are: (1) older children increasingly differentiate among the effects of conditions that determine mental states; and (2) children progress from understanding direct one-to-one relations between a determining condition and a mental state to understanding interactions in which one condition mediates the effects of another in producing a mental state.