Abstract
Previous studies suggest that visual encoding of ethnicity of in-group/out-group members might influence empathy and sensorimotor sharing. Here, we investigated whether mental perspective taking, presumably a precursor of empathy, is also influenced by in-group/out-group perception and the implicit attitudes toward it. We used an embodied egocentric visual-perspective taking task, the full body rotation task (FBR), in which participants were asked to mentally rotate themselves into the position of dark- or light-skinned bodies. FBR was contrasted to a pure sensorimotor task, the hand laterality task (HLT), in which participants were asked to mentally rotate their hand to the posture of seen light- or dark-skinned hands, which does not require mental simulation of another person’s perspective. We expected the FBR but not the HLT to be influenced by the skin color of the stimuli and by the individual implicit biases toward out-group members. Contrary to this hypothesis, we found that neither skin color nor implicit biases modulated reaction times (RTs) in either task. The data thus suggest that unlike other empathy tasks, skin color does not influence visuospatial perspective taking.
Highlights
To understand other people’s actions, intentions, and emotions, we presumably unconsciously simulate their perspective and map their bodily states through our own sensorimotor system
A random slope for Implicit Bias was initially modeled as indicated in Field (2009) but omitted as it did not improve the model fit when evaluating the change in −2 log-likelihood in the full body rotation task (FBR) (χ2(2) = 0.87, p = 0.65) and in the hand laterality task (HLT) (χ2(2) = 0.22, p = 0.90)
In the HLT, reaction times (RTs) were not predicted by the factors Implicit Bias (p = 0.35) or Skin Color (p = 0.56), nor by the interaction between Implicit Bias and Skin Color (p = 0.48)
Summary
To understand other people’s actions, intentions, and emotions, we presumably unconsciously simulate their perspective and map their bodily states through our own sensorimotor system (termed “sensorimotor resonance”; but see Vannuscorps et al, 2013). Participants made laterality judgments for light- or dark-skinned avatars viewed from different angles, by putting themselves in the spatial perspective of another person and deciding from this perspective whether the left or right hand was marked This task has shown to recruit areas in the TPJ (e.g., Zacks et al, 2003; Ganesh et al, 2015; van Elk et al, 2017), a crucial hub in the empathy-related network (review in Singer, 2006). We predicted a facilitation of mental body transformations (i.e., faster RTs) toward the perspective of an in-group (i.e., light-skinned) as compared to an out-group (dark-skinned) member We expected this effect to be positively correlated with implicit biases. We predicted no influence of skin color and/or implicit bias toward out-groups on the HLT
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