What the study was testing

1. Piaget and Inhelder wanted to study perspective taking, meaning the relationship between a child's own viewpoint and their grasp of someone else's.
2. This matters because Piaget claimed pre-operational children are egocentric, assuming everyone sees what they see, and that this fades as they move into the concrete operational stage.

How the task worked

1. The sample was 100 children, made up of 21 aged four to six, 30 aged six to eight, 33 aged eight to nine and 16 aged nine to twelve.
2. Each child sat at a metre square model of three mountains, with four viewpoints around it labelled A to D and a doll moved between them.
3. Trial one: the child arranged three coloured boards to show their own view of the mountains and then the doll's view.
4. Trial two: the child was shown 10 photographs together and had to pick the one showing what the doll could see.
5. Trial three: the child chose a picture and then placed the doll in the position from which it would see that view.

What the children did

1. The four to six year olds either reproduced their own view or chose at random, so they were not yet working from the doll's position.
2. The seven to nine year olds tried to take the doll's view but managed it only inconsistently, getting some trials right and others wrong.
3. Only the nine to twelve year olds mastered the task and chose the doll's view reliably.

What Piaget and Inhelder concluded

1. They concluded that pre-operational egocentrism gradually gives way to concrete operational decentring, the ability to hold a viewpoint other than your own.
2. Because the change appeared at roughly the ages Piaget predicted, the study supports his claim that thinking develops in stages rather than smoothly.

Strengths and weaknesses

1. A strength is that the procedure was standardised, so other researchers can repeat it exactly and check the result.
2. Testing the same idea three different ways is a further strength, because a child who fails all three formats is unlikely to have simply misunderstood one of them.
3. A weakness is that the task is artificial, since choosing photographs of a model landscape is nothing like anything a child normally does.
4. A second weakness is that Hughes found children could hide a doll from a policeman far earlier, so this task may underestimate what they can do.

Turning this into marks

1. Name the model, the four positions, the doll and at least one trial in full when you describe the procedure.
2. Pair each age band with its behaviour when you give the findings.
3. Finish by saying the results support the shift from pre-operational to concrete operational thinking.