Perceptual egocentrism and mental rotation in primary school age: the invisible man paradigm proposal

The capacity to imagine what a scene, an object or an array of objects looks like when seeing from a different viewpoint is crucial in everyday life. It allows imagining what another individual sees and then better understanding his or her intentions, actions, and emotional reactions. The ability of perspective-taking, taken individually, does not seem sufficient to demonstrate the ability, in the child, to have a coherent representation of the space, to allow the manipulation of viewpoints. The ability to assume an allocentric perspective, in this view, is not reducible to the mechanical assumption of another’s position in space. The central node is the of performing a mental rotation on ourselves by maintaining a main perspective of the environment. In this view, leaving perceptive egocentrism resides in the ability, based on the mental rotation skills, to simultaneously use egocentric, allocentric and heterocentric perspectives. Starting from this assumption, the present research project intended to investigate the relationship between age, perspective taking skills and mental rotation