1. Introduction

Perspective-taking has been defined as the social-cognitive ability to assume another individual's perspective, to infer thoughts, emotions, and motivations [1]. For many years, mainstream developmental psychologists have studied children's development regarding the understanding of thoughts and beliefs of others (for a review see [2]). This cognitive approach,

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

known as Theory of Mind (ToM) [3], has been an inspiration for psychologists studying typical and atypical development in children. Indeed, a search conducted using the filter "theory of mind" in PsycINFO, returned more than 6400 entries— including theses, books, and journal articles. An interest in these phenomena has also been shown by behavioral psychologists. The recently developed Relational Frame Theory (RFT) [4], which is a modern behavioral approach to the study of language and cognition, considers perspective-taking as generalized operant behavior that can be learned [5–7]. In line with the RFT approach, learning to respond to appropriate questions defined on the base of deictic relations — such as I-YOU, HERE-THERE, and NOW-THEN—, appears to be critical in establishing perspective-taking repertoires [8]. Such relations have been learned from a history of multiple exemplars of asking and responding to questions such as, "What am I doing now?", "What did you eat then?" or "Where were you jumping then?". Each time these questions are answered, the physical properties of environment are different. However, the relational properties of I-you, herethere, and now-then remain constant across all exemplars. That is to say, the so-called deictic relations are an abstraction of an individual's perspective of the world and of others, in other words, deictic relations specify a relation in terms of the perspective of the speaker [4].

language contexts. These studies have suggested that deictic relations should be presented in contexts similar to activities of daily life in order to facilitate generalization of perspectivetaking ability. However, there is no published study to date that has investigated whether the modifications to the original Barnes-Holmes protocol improve deictic relational responding. McHugh et al. [7] compared four conditions to present the trials in the adult population (in written versus spoken form, and with visual aids versus no visual aids), but all conditions

Assessing Perspective-Taking in Children through Different Formats of Deictic Framing Protocol

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The goal of this chapter was to compare different variations of perspective-taking protocol to assess deictic relational responding in children. The purpose of Study 1 was to determine if a protocol involving a set of contextual cues that were systematically different to each other and without necessarily using the exact words I-you, here-there, or now-then, would allow participants to more reliably identify responses based on the underlying deictic relations. If in fact the variability in the scenarios proposed by Vilardaga et al. [20] showed better performance for the Barnes-Holmes protocol, this would allow the development of a specific measure of deictic relation responding for children. The purpose of Study 2 was to analyze whether in fact performance with the Barnes-Holmes protocol improved due to the changes resulting from the previous study. In this last study the features of different conditions from Study 1 would be integrated in order to design a new deictic relational measure developed specifically to fit the

Twenty-three participants (14 girls and 9 boys) aged 6–7 years old were selected for participation in the experiment. All of the participants were typically developing students and they were recruited from a primary school. The consent of parents and teachers was sought prior to each child's participation. Criteria for participation included that neither their mainstream schoolteachers nor parents had identified them as having any learning difficulties. All of the children in this study were reported by their teachers to read at grade level, displayed no reading comprehension problems and an absence of disruptive behavior that could interfere

The experiment was conducted in a quiet room free from distraction, located at the school which children attended. Participants were exposed to the experimental procedures individually in two sessions. Sessions could be terminated upon the child's request at any time (although this never occurred). The perspective-taking tasks consisted of different deictic relations protocols (explained in the Procedure) which included the three types of deictic frames (i.e., I-You, Here-There, and Now-Then) and the three levels of relational complexity (i.e., simple, reversed, and double

were based on the structure of the original Barnes-Holmes protocol.

childhood population.

2. Study 1

2.1. Participants

with performing the tasks required.

reversed) used in the Barnes-Holmes protocol.

2.2. Setting and material

The first RFT study on perspective-taking in term of deictic relations was reported by Barnes-Holmes [5]. In this study, a testing and training protocol was developed for establishing the three deictic relations on the three levels of relational complexity (i.e., simple, reversed, and double reversed relational response) in young children. A simple relational response consists of relations in which none of the elements are reversed (e.g., "I-experimenter- am sitting here in a blue chair and you -participant- are sitting there in a black chair. Where are you sitting?"). In a reversed relational response, some of the elements are reversed (e.g., "If I were you and you were me, where would you be sitting?") and a correct response reflects this relational reversal (i.e., the experimenter is sitting in a black chair and the participant is sitting in a blue chair). In a double reversed relational response, two relations are reversed simultaneously (e.g., "If I were you and you were me and if here were there and there were here, where would you be sitting?") and a correct response would appear to require more complex derived relational activity (i.e., the experimenter would be sitting on the blue chair and the participant would be sitting on the black chair).

Many studies have investigated the RFT approach to perspective-taking through the Barnes-Holmes protocol [8–14]. Studies such as those by Heagle and Rehfeldt [15] or Rehfeldt et al. [11] improved perspective-taking skills by means of reinforcement contingencies during the training trials for correct responses on the deictic relational protocol. Others [10, 14] established the relationship between deictic framing and ToM skills. This protocol has also shown that deictic responding can help to understand clinical concepts such as social anhedonia or schizophrenia (e.g. [13, 16, 17]).

In recent years, the format of the original protocol has been modified in different studies. For example, the approach used in Davlin et al. [18] and in Gilroy et al. [19] was an extension of the Barnes-Holmes deictic framing protocol using a story reading context. These authors used more naturalistic story reading procedures from storybook materials, resources readily available to young children. Vilardaga et al. [20] created scenarios systematically developed on the basis of core deictic relations, although different from each other and suited for natural language contexts. These studies have suggested that deictic relations should be presented in contexts similar to activities of daily life in order to facilitate generalization of perspectivetaking ability. However, there is no published study to date that has investigated whether the modifications to the original Barnes-Holmes protocol improve deictic relational responding. McHugh et al. [7] compared four conditions to present the trials in the adult population (in written versus spoken form, and with visual aids versus no visual aids), but all conditions were based on the structure of the original Barnes-Holmes protocol.

The goal of this chapter was to compare different variations of perspective-taking protocol to assess deictic relational responding in children. The purpose of Study 1 was to determine if a protocol involving a set of contextual cues that were systematically different to each other and without necessarily using the exact words I-you, here-there, or now-then, would allow participants to more reliably identify responses based on the underlying deictic relations. If in fact the variability in the scenarios proposed by Vilardaga et al. [20] showed better performance for the Barnes-Holmes protocol, this would allow the development of a specific measure of deictic relation responding for children. The purpose of Study 2 was to analyze whether in fact performance with the Barnes-Holmes protocol improved due to the changes resulting from the previous study. In this last study the features of different conditions from Study 1 would be integrated in order to design a new deictic relational measure developed specifically to fit the childhood population.
