PERCEIVED REACHABILITY FOR SELF AND FOR OTHERS BY 3-YEAR-OLD T0 5-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN AND ADULTS

Ability to perceive the distance at which an object is within reach wa s assessed in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children and adults. In different situations, subjects had to judge whether an object placed in the ver tical or horizontal plane was reachable for themselves or for someone else (the experimenter). Adults as well as children differentiated bet ween the limits of their own prehensile space and those of another per son. At all ages, children tend to attribute systematically more reach ability to the adult experimenter. Furthermore, both children and adul ts systematically underestimate reachability for others in a horizonta l presentation of the object. For all age groups, judgments of reachab ility for self are bodily scaled and based on perceived degrees of beh avioral freedom for self and for others. From 3 years of age, children are shown to resemble adults in their ability to perceive what object s afford for action, either for self or for others. These results are interpreted as further evidence of early allocentrism (i.e., spatial d ecentration and perspective taking) in the context of a practical task . (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.