Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Historically the view has dominated that infants are initially egocentric and that the ability to take the perspectives of others is a cognitive achievement only reached later in development. Against this, Southgate (2020) has recently argued that even young infants are able to take the perspective of others and that this perspective is encoded more strongly than their own perspective. I focus on three elements of Southgate's proposal: a) children are initially altercentric, b) once they develop a self-awareness they become egocentric and c) early forms of perspective taking do not require perspective understanding. While I agree with c) and the criticism of the assumption that infants must start off being egocentric, I will argue that there is evidence that young children are not predominantly altercentric either. Instead, which perspective is activated is dependent on the situational context. I develop a proposal of this using the mental files framework.