3.4. Procedure

At the beginning of each session, participants were given the same instructions as Study 1. The experimenter read all tasks aloud from the perspective-taking protocol, the participant responded orally and the experimenter recorded each response. The order of the presentation of the different trials was identical to that employed in all conditions in Study 1. As in previous conditions, no corrective feedback was provided for participants' responses.

This study was in keeping with the philosophy of the Vilardaga et al. [20] study, in which scenarios were created differently to each other. The trials were randomly selected from Condition 3 of Study 1, however the contexts were simplified in order to make it easier to respond under the control of deictic contextual cues (full protocol may be obtained by writing to the principal author). In addition, the exact terms I-You and Now-Then remained constant in line with Condition 1 of the previous study. Another key feature that differentiated this study from Condition 3 in Study 1 was that now a range of visual aids were employed to facilitate responding to all of the tasks contained within the protocol. This protocol was not presented in written form. The visual aids included pictures all different to each other, such as a bicycle, skates, a classroom, a theater and an ice-cream, amongst others. For example, if the experimenter said "I am at a bakery and you are at a sweetshop" the experimenter would have a picture of a bakery and the participant would have a picture of sweetshop. These modifications were made in order to involve the participant in more realistic contextual cues than in Condition 3. Seeing and holding the photos provided a more realistic representation than reading the sentence. In a similar fashion to Condition 1 and Condition 2, the actual locations of the visual aids remain fixed in reversed and double reversed trials.

The length of this protocol was 18 trials, including trials containing all three frames and the three levels of complexity. Due to the differences between Condition 3a and Condition 3b in the previous study being non-significant, each trial of Study 2 consisted of two questions in line with Condition 1, in order to minimize the assessment times. After answering the first question, participants were asked the second question immediately. A correct response to a trial required that the participants answered both questions correctly. In line with Condition 3 in Study 1, in order to discriminate between reversed and double reversed relations, as well as to eliminate fatigue because of sentences being too long, each reversed and double reversed relation was separated, indicating only the part of the reversal of each question (i.e., If the park was the aquarium, where would I be?; If the aquarium was the park, where would you be?).
