Abstract
Studies of visual perspective-taking have shown that adults can rapidly and accurately compute their own and other peoples’ viewpoints, but they experience difficulties when the two perspectives are inconsistent. We tested whether these egocentric (i.e., interference from one’s own perspective) and altercentric biases (i.e., interference from another person’s perspective) persist in ecologically valid complex environments. Participants (N = 150) completed a dot-probe visual perspective-taking task, in which they verified the number of discs in natural scenes containing real people, first only according to their own perspective and then judging both their own and another person’s perspective. Results showed that the other person’s perspective did not disrupt self perspective-taking judgements when the other perspective was not explicitly prompted. In contrast, egocentric and altercentric biases were found when participants were prompted to switch between self and other perspectives. These findings suggest that altercentric visual perspective-taking can be activated spontaneously in complex real-world contexts, but is subject to both top-down and bottom-up influences, including explicit prompts or salient visual stimuli.
Highlights
Visual perspective-taking (VPT) is a crucial component of our ability to understand and predict other’s mental states, and is linked with Theory of Mind (ToM)
The current study focuses on Level-1 VPT and tests the degree to which observers automatically compute other people’s and their own visual perspectives within complex real-world environments
Journal of Experimental Psychology 00(0). They have to judge their own perspective and inhibit the avatar’s different visual perspective. Together these results suggest that the brain cannot ignore the irrelevant perspective and that performance on this VPT task involves automatic or spontaneous calculation of self and other perspectives (Samson et al, 2010)
Summary
Visual perspective-taking (VPT) is a crucial component of our ability to understand and predict other’s mental states, and is linked with Theory of Mind (ToM). In line with this implicit mentalising account, some researchers have shown that attentional effects are attenuated when the avatar was replaced by a non-social directional cue (Nielsen et al, 2015; Samson et al, 2010), Experiment 3; Schurz et al, 2015), or when the avatar’s awareness of their surroundings was compromised by an occlusion (e.g., a barrier or opaque goggles; Baker et al, 2016; Furlanetto et al, 2016) This claim has been further supported by eye-tracking data showing that participants attended to the scene differently when they were cued to judge self versus other perspectives the directional features of the avatar were matched (Ferguson et al, 2017), and by studies showing that the extent to which observers experience interference from the self/other perspective is modulated by in/out-group associations with the avatar (Ferguson et al, 2018; Simpson & Todd, 2017; Todd et al, 2011). A purely attentional account is much clearer in predicting no altercentric effects when the self-perspective is tested in isolation, and that consistency effects would be reduced or eliminated due to distractors in the natural environment, which would compete for attention, reduce the salience of the person’s directional features (i.e., nose, eyes), and deplete general processing resources needed to verify the other person’s perspective
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