P. Rochat, PERCEIVED REACHABILITY FOR SELF AND FOR OTHERS BY 3-YEAR-OLD T0 5-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN AND ADULTS, Journal of experimental child psychology, 59(2), 1995, pp. 317-333
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.