Perspective taking promotes action understanding and learning.

[Retraction Notice: A retraction for this article was reported in Vol 34(5) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (see record 2008-13337-018). All authors retract this article. Co-author Tversky and co-author Hard believe that the research results cannot be relied upon; Sandra C. Lozano takes full responsibility for the need to retract this article.] People often learn actions by watching others. The authors propose and test the hypothesis that perspective taking promotes encoding a hierarchical representation of an actor's goals and subgoals-a key process for observational learning. Observers segmented videos of an object assembly task into coarse and fine action units. They described what happened in each unit from either the actor's, their own, or another observer's perspective and later performed the assembly task themselves. Participants who described the task from the actor's perspective encoded actions more hierarchically during observation and learned the task better. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)