Abstract
Previous research has shown that calculating if something is to someone’s left or right involves a simulative process recruiting representations of our own body in imagining ourselves in the position of the other person (Kessler and Rutherford, 2010). We compared left and right judgements from another’s spatial position (spatial perspective judgements) to judgements of how a numeral appeared from another’s point of view (visual perspective judgements). Experiment 1 confirmed that these visual and spatial perspective judgements involved a process of rotation as they became more difficult with angular disparity between the self and other. There was evidence of some difference between the two, but both showed a linear pattern. Experiment 2 went a step further in showing that these judgements used embodied self rotations, as their difficulty was also dependent on the current position of the self within the world. This effect was significantly stronger in spatial perspective-taking, but was present in both cases. We conclude that embodied self-rotations, through which we actively imagine ourselves assuming someone else’s position in the world can subserve not only reasoning about where objects are in relation to someone else but also how the objects in their environment appear to them.
Highlights
Human beings operate in complex social and spatial environments
It is clear that a mature system for visual perspective-taking at times necessitates processing beyond the spatial relations between a person and the objects within their environment
In Experiment 2, we showed that this process could involve an embodied self rotation
Summary
Human beings operate in complex social and spatial environments. In order to be successful, we must navigate our way around this complex world, in which other people are important. It is clear that a mature system for visual perspective-taking at times necessitates processing beyond the spatial relations between a person and the objects within their environment. Take for example a woman who hands her elderly husband his glasses to examine a passage in a book that, while it looks perfectly clear to her, she knows will appear blurry to him. In contrast to these special cases, there are a multitude of everyday social situations where rapid decision-making about approximations to other people’s visual experiences can be made on the basis of spatial relations and orientations. We build on recent work comparing visual and spatial perspective-taking judgements (Kessler and Thomson, 2010; Kessler and Rutherford, 2010; Michelon and Zacks, 2006; Surtees et al, 2013) and examine the role for embodiment and rotation in visual and spatial perspective judgements
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