Abstract
Being able to judge another person's visuo-spatial perspective is an essential social skill, hence we investigated the generalizability of the involved mechanisms across cultures and genders. Developmental, cross-species, and our own previous research suggest that two different forms of perspective taking can be distinguished, which are subserved by two distinct mechanisms. The simpler form relies on inferring another's line-of-sight, whereas the more complex form depends on embodied transformation into the other's orientation in form of a simulated body rotation. Our current results suggest that, in principle, the same basic mechanisms are employed by males and females in both, East-Asian (EA; Chinese) and Western culture. However, we also confirmed the hypothesis that Westerners show an egocentric bias, whereas EAs reveal an other-oriented bias. Furthermore, Westerners were slower overall than EAs and showed stronger gender differences in speed and depth of embodied processing. Our findings substantiate differences and communalities in social cognition mechanisms across genders and two cultures and suggest that cultural evolution or transmission should take gender as a modulating variable into account.
Highlights
Some fundamental aspects of human social behaviour are shared with other species, whereas some aspects are uniquely human and typically involve representing and reflecting upon other’s experiences and mental states, such as imagining another’s perspective [1,2]
Flavell et al [3] proposed that so-called level 1 perspective taking reflects understanding of what another can perceive, e.g. which objects are visible, which occluded to another person, while level 2 involves mentally adopting someone else’s point of view and understanding how the world is represented from this imagined perspective
Corvids and perhaps many other species seem capable of following gaze and of inferring what is visible or hidden from another’s view in much the same way as humans [9,10,11,12]; in contrast, human aptitude for perspective taking extends far beyond that seen in other animals, these higher forms of perspective taking may have phylo- and ontogenetic roots in their basic counterparts or in action control [13]
Summary
Some fundamental aspects of human social behaviour are shared with other species, whereas some aspects are uniquely human and typically involve representing and reflecting upon other’s experiences and mental states, such as imagining another’s perspective [1,2]. 60 110 160 males patterns across groups (culture, gender) was reflected by the strongest effect sizes h2p) for the interactions between task  posture and task  angular disparity reported above.
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