Abstract
Experiments demonstrating level-1 visual perspective-taking have been interpreted as providing important evidence for ‘implicit mentalising’—the ability to track simple mental states in a fast and efficient manner. However, this interpretation has been contested by a rival ‘submentalising’ account that proposes that these experiments can be explained by the general purpose mechanisms responsible for attentional orienting. Here, we aim to discriminate between these competing accounts by examining whether a gaze aversion manipulation expected to enhance attention orienting would have similar effects on both perspective-taking and attention orienting tasks. Gaze aversion was operationalised by manipulating head position relative to torso of the avatar figures employed in two experiments (gaze-averted vs. gaze-maintained). Experiment 1 used a Posner cueing task to establish that gaze aversion enhanced attention orienting cued by these avatars. Using the avatar task, Experiment 2 revealed level-1 visual perspective-taking effects of equivalent magnitude for gaze-averted and gaze-maintained conditions. These results indicate that gaze aversion moderated attention orienting but not perspective-taking. This dissociation in performance favours implicit mentalising by casting doubt on the submentalising account. It further constrains theorising by implying that attention orienting is not integral to the system permitting the relatively automatic tracking of mental states.
Highlights
Understanding what other people know—an ability often called mentalising or perspective-taking—is crucial to effective social interaction
Experiment 2 demonstrated that this manipulation did not affect level-1 visual perspective-taking (L1-VPT), by revealing a consistency effect in the avatar task that was not moderated by avatar stance
The present study demonstrates that conditions that facilitate attention orienting do not facilitate L1-VPT as measured by the avatar task
Summary
Understanding what other people know—an ability often called mentalising or perspective-taking—is crucial to effective social interaction. The avatar’s head and/or body orientation might spatially orient participants’ attention, leading to enhanced performance when this region of space contains all the items visible to participants (matching trials). In line with this hypothesis, consistency effects of comparable magnitude occur when the avatar is replaced by an arrow ([19]; but see [20,21]). It has been suggested that the gaze-averted stimulus provides an enhanced cueing effect, because this combination more reliably indicates a person’s active attentional behaviour than the more passive gaze-maintained combination [29] Both types of stimuli have an unbroken line-of-sight and equivalent.
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