"Own view" versus "good view" in a perspective-taking task

Children who fail spatial perspective-taking tasks of the "3 mountains" variety apparently preferentially select pictures showing their own view. It has been suggested that this might arise, at least in part, because children in such tasks have been given particularly good views of the arrays. To test this, an experiment was conducted with 40 4-6-year-olds in which children were tested from both "good" and "poor" viewing positions. As hypothesized, children did not show any bias toward their own view when it was a poor one. However, when they themselves had a good view of the objects, they chose their own rather than another equally good view. Thus, 2 selection principles appear to operate hierarchically, selection of good view having priority over selection of own view.