Abstract: The study aimed to investigate the level 1 perspective-taking of 3 to 5-year-old children and to explore the potential differences between their behavioral and verbal performances. Specifically, Experiment 1 adopted the “one-way mirror” paradigm to capture the performances of 54 children. Logistic regression analysis showed that children’s behavioral performances were almost the same across ages (B = -0.225, Wald = 0.38, p = 0.541). ANOVA analysis also found that there was no discrepancy between behavioral and verbatim data. Given the limitations of the scoring system and lacking control of natural preference in the behavioral paradigm, we improved it in Experiment 2 by applying a hide-and-seek game to another group of 60 children. Three-way ANOVA analysis indicated significant interaction among task type, age and gender (F (2, 48) = 3.55, p = 0.037, η2 = 0.13). These results suggested that the behavioral performances improved from 3 to 5-year-olds in both girls and boys, with boy s’ verbal responses improved to a lesser extent than girls’. Taken together, these findings suggested that a behavioral task might provide additional information to tasks designed merely to capture verbal responses when assessing children’s level 1 perspective-taking.

Key words: perspective-taking, strategy use, behavioral performance, verbal performance