Through your eyes: incongruence of gaze and action increases spontaneous perspective taking

Tiziano Furlanetto,Andrea Cavallo,Valeria Manera,Barbara Tversky,Cristina Becchio

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00455

Abstract

What makes people spontaneously adopt the perspective of others? Previous work suggested that perspective taking can serve understanding the actions of others. Two studies corroborate and extend that interpretation. The first study varied cues to intentionality of eye gaze and action, and found that the more the actor was perceived as potentially interacting with the objects, the stronger the tendency to take his perspective. The second study investigated how manipulations of gaze affect the tendency to adopt the perspective of another reaching for an object. Eliminating gaze cues by blurring the actor's face did not reduce perspective-taking, suggesting that in the absence of gaze information, observers rely entirely on the action. Intriguingly, perspective-taking was higher when gaze and action did not signal the same intention, suggesting that in presence of ambiguous behavioral intention, people are more likely take the other's perspective to try to understand the action.

Highlights

Near/far, above/below, right/left presuppose a referential center of orientation
The first study varied cues to intentionality of eye gaze and action, and found that the more the actor was perceived as potentially interacting with the objects, the stronger the tendency to take his perspective
To assess the influence of agency cues on spontaneous perspective taking, separate binary logistic regression analyses were conducted on 3PP, 1PP, and neutral responses

Summary

Introduction

Near/far, above/below, right/left presuppose a referential center of orientation. The scene included a person looking or reaching for one of the objects, almost one third of participants spontaneously adopted the other person’s perspective, describing the locations from the other’s right or left (Tversky and Hard, 2009). These findings indicate that the presence of another person may encourage participants to spontaneously take that person spatial perspective, and describe the locations of the objects from her right or left. Studies investigating spontaneous visual perspective taking found that observers were slower to make self-perspective judgments when the scene includes a person looking at the scene from a different visual perspective, suggesting that even when the other person’s perspective is irrelevant to the task, observers cannot prevent computing the other’s perspective (Samson et al, 2010)

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Conclusion