Children's understanding of misinterpretation: Source identification and perspective-taking

The relationship was investigated between children's ability to predict another observer's interpretation of an ambiguous picture and children's ability to identify the source of their own or another observer's misinterpretation after it had occurred. Children aged 4, 5, and 6 year were asked (a) to infer a puppet's interpretation of a small, ambiguous portion of a drawing after the puppet had been led to have an erroneous expectation about the drawing's identity and (b) to identify the source of children's own misinterpretation of a drawing. Six-year-olds were more likely than 4- and 5-year-olds (a) to predict that the puppet would misinterpret the target-restricted view and (b) to explain their mistake by explicitly referring to the pictures they had seen previously. These two abilities were correlated with each other.