By Bruce Bower
Infants make sense of the social world from the inside out. By age 1, kids rapidly incorporate their own visual experiences into a framework for understanding what other people can or can’t see, a new study finds.
Personal experience enables social thinking in early childhood, say Andrew Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks, both psychologists at the University of Washington in Seattle.
In their experiments, briefly blocking the vision of 1-year-olds with a blindfold led the youngsters to appreciate that a blindfolded adult couldn’t see toys resting on a table, an insight that typically eludes kids at that age.
Brief use of a trick, see-through blindfold led 18-month-olds to assume that a blindfolded adult could see objects in plain view, even though 18-month-old children rarely make such a mistake.