Evaluation of a children’s game for teaching basic relational responses in children typically developing preschoolers

Abstract

The present study aimed to assess whether a children’s game was able to teach deictic relational responses to preschool children with typical development, in addition to comparing the performance of children in the game with perspective-taking measures already established in the literature. Eight children with an average age of three years and nine months participated the study, who were submitted to Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks and to the adapted perspective-taking protocol (RFT-TP) before and after the intervention. The analysis of the results showed that the game was able to increase the frequency of correct deictic relational responses. However, this did not mean an improvement in the participants’ performance in tasks that traditionally assess perspective taking. Future studies could investigate the impact of other materials, as well as game application variations with participants of different ages and developmental characteristics. Extending the game’s comparison to traditional perspective-taking measures would indicate whether the game could also be used as a measure.