General Patterns of Development of Visual-Spatial Perspective-Taking and Theory of Mind in Children

This article is aimed at finding a general scheme for the development of Level 2 visual perspective-taking and the Theory of Mind. An analysis of scientific sources has shown that with the development of the Theory of Mind, children initially acquire the ability to solve verbal false-belief tasks and only after about two years overcome difficulties in perceiving intensional contexts. The difficulty of intensionality is that two terms referring to the same referent cannot be interchanged. The solution to this problem occurs as a result of the child's awareness that his own and others' opinions about the same object are true. Thus, children begin by representing mental states, and later come to understand the recursive nature of these states. At the same time, modern research has demonstrated a longer path of development of Level 2 visual perspective-taking than was assumed in early works, which is due to the complexity of constructing a representation of another person. At this level, the child begins to realize exactly what visual knowledge is available to an opponent who is looking at the scene from a contrasting viewpoint. He develops the ability to simultaneously hold two different viewpoints on an object. Based on the analysis of scientific sources, it was concluded that the visual-spatial perspective-taking and the Theory of Mind are based on a common set of mental skills. The child becomes able to resolve the conflict of two viewpoints on the same object, through to a second-order strategy - embedding perspectives into each other.