Abstract
Previous research provides evidence for a dissociable embodied route to spatial perspective-taking that is under strategic control. The present experiment investigated further the influence of strategy on spatial perspective-taking by assessing whether participants may also elect to employ a separable “disembodied” route loading on inhibitory control mechanisms. Participants (N = 92) undertook both the “own body transformation” (OBT) perspective-taking task, requiring speeded spatial judgments made from the perspective of an observed figure, and a control task measuring ability to inhibit spatially compatible responses in the absence of a figure. Perspective-taking performance was found to be related to performance on the response inhibition control task, in that participants who tended to take longer to adopt a new perspective also tended to show a greater elevation in response times when inhibiting spatially compatible responses. This relationship was restricted to those participants reporting that they adopted the perspective of another by reversing left and right whenever confronted with a front-view figure; it was absent in those participants who reported perspective-taking by mentally transforming their spatial orientation to align with that of the figure. Combined with previously published results, these findings complete a double dissociation between embodied and disembodied routes to spatial perspective-taking, implying that spatial perspective-taking is subject to modulation by strategy, and suggesting that embodied routes to perspective-taking may place minimal demands on domain general executive functions.
Highlights
Spatial perspective-taking underlies successful social interactions (Tversky and Hard, 2009), for instance when giving directions or demonstrating how to perform a task
Participants were excluded from the analysis due to an error rate (ER) of above 15% on either the Transpose task (N = 5, all female), or the own body transformation” (OBT) task (N = 14, 12 female)
In order to measure the relative increase in response times for the incompatible versus compatible condition, a “Composite response time (RT)” for both tasks was computed for each participant according to the formula: Composite RT =/compatible RT—see Gronholm et al (2012)
Summary
Spatial perspective-taking underlies successful social interactions (Tversky and Hard, 2009), for instance when giving directions or demonstrating how to perform a task. Outstanding issues include identifying the types of perspective-taking that are possible via a “disembodied” route that engages response inhibition rather than motor simulation or social processes, as well as the role played by endogenous control processes in selecting between multiple perspective-taking routes. The aim of the current study was to examine how these two types of executive processes influence perspective-taking, by assessing whether the strategy that participants report using moderates the relationship between perspective-taking ability in the “own body transformation” (OBT) task (e.g., Zacks et al, 1999; Blanke et al, 2005; Mohr et al, 2010) and ability to perform a control task indexing disembodied response inhibition processes
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