Undergraduate URCA Poster Presentations

Grace: My poster summarizes the research I conducted for my honors thesis project. My study explored how children's friendship preferences influence their theory-of-mind performance and whether membership in the target group and friendship jointly affect theory-of-mind performance. The results showed that friendship may affect theory of mind development differently across development. As children get older, they may be more likely to have egocentric errors in perspective-taking with preferred friends than with non-preferred friends. We also found that as children get older, they tend to be worse at taking the perspective of ingroup members who are also their preferred friends than at taking the perspective of outgroup members who are not their preferred friends. This suggests that increased levels of social closeness may lead to more errors in perspective-taking as children get older.