Alignment Effects in Spatial Perspective Taking from an External Vantage Point.

Adamantini Hatzipanayioti,Marios N Avraamides

doi:10.3390/brainsci11020204

Adamantini Hatzipanayioti, Marios N Avraamides

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11020204

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Abstract

In three experiments, we examined, using a perceptual task, the difficulties of spatial perspective taking. Participants imagined adopting perspectives around a table and pointed from them towards the positions of a target. Depending on the condition, the scene was presented on a virtual screen in Virtual Reality or projected on an actual screen in the real world (Experiment 1), or viewed as immediate in Virtual Reality (Experiment 2). Furthermore, participants pointed with their arm (Experiments 1 and 2) vs. a joystick (Experiment 3). Results showed a greater alignment effect (i.e., a larger difference in performance between trials with imagined perspectives that were aligned vs. misaligned with the orientation of the participant) when executing the task in a virtual rather than in the real environment, suggesting that visual access to body information and room geometry, which is typically lacking in Virtual Reality, influences perspective taking performance. The alignment effect was equal across the Virtual Reality conditions of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, suggesting that being an internal (compared to an external) observer to the scene induces no additional difficulties for perspective taking. Equal alignment effects were also found when pointing with the arm vs. a joystick, indicating that a body-dependent response mode such as pointing with the arm creates no further difficulties for reasoning from imagined perspectives.

Highlights

Many tasks of everyday life require that we mentally adopt a spatial perspective other than the one we occupy physically
In order to assess the presence of alignment effects we followed the approach of Kelly et al (2007) to average the misaligned perspectives to a single mean and compare it with the physical (0◦ ) perspective
That being immediate to a spatial scene, Based on previous findings, we hypothesized being immediate to a spatial scene, albeit external to it, might lead to a greater alignmentthat effect than when reasoning about the albeit external to it, might lead to a greater alignment effect than when reasoning about same scene depicted on a screen

Summary

Introduction

Many tasks of everyday life require that we mentally adopt a spatial perspective other than the one we occupy physically. In order to describe a turn as left or right when providing route directions to others, we may imagine ourselves at a location on the route, facing a particular direction This mental perspective taking is rather effortful, as documented by the presence of an alignment effect: localizing an object from an imagined perspective is slower and more prone to error as the angular disparity (i.e., the difference between one’s actual and imagined perspective) increases [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. In order to localize an object from an imagined perspective, one needs to first mentally rotate an egocentric reference frame in alignment with the imagined perspective and use it to compute the location of the object from that orientation According to this mental transformation account, the greater the angle of rotation, the longer it takes to complete this process and the higher the probability of committing an error

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