Visuospatial Perspective-taking Research Articles

Out of your sight, out of my mind: Knowledge about another person's visual access modulates spontaneous visuospatial perspective-taking.

Accumulating evidence suggests that humans spontaneously adopt each other's visuospatial perspective (VSP), but many aspects about the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate whether knowledge about another's visual access systematically modulates spontaneous VSP-taking. In a spatial compatibility task, a participant and a confederate sat at a 90°angle to each other, with visual stimuli being aligned vertically for the participants and horizontally for the confederate. In this task, VSP-taking is reflected in a spatial compatibility effect in the participant, because stimulus-response compatibility occurs only if the participant takes the confederate's perspective. We manipulated the visual access of the confederate during the task by means of glasses with adjustable shutters that allowed or prevented the confederate from seeing the visual stimuli. The results of 2 experiments showed that people only adopted their task partner's VSP if that person had unhindered visual access to the stimuli. Provided that the confederate had visual access to the participant's stimuli, VSP-taking occurred regardless of whether the confederate performed the same visual task as the participant (Experiment 1) or a different, auditory task (Experiment 2). The results suggest that knowledge about another's visual access is pivotal for triggering spontaneous VSP-taking, whereas having the same task is not. We discuss the possibility that spontaneous VSP-taking can effectively facilitate spatial alignment processes in social interaction. (PsycINFO Database Record

Linking empathy to visuospatial perspective-taking in gambling addiction

It has been demonstrated that people suffering from substance-related addictions are less empathic than their non-addicted counterparts. Our first aim was to verify if this is also true for behavioral addictions. We hypothesized that problem gamblers are less empathic than healthy controls. Our second aim was to identify a cognitive marker of empathy that could be targeted in cognitive rehabilitation strategies. We propose that a potential cognitive marker of empathy could be visuospatial perspective-taking. Specifically, we hypothesized that visuospatial perspective-taking performances are lower in problem gamblers compared to healthy controls and that these visuospatial performances predict empathy. Thirty-one non-gamblers, 24 healthy gamblers, and 21 problem gamblers performed a visuospatial perspective-taking task before completing the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1980; Davis, 1983). Problem gamblers had decreased empathy and lower performance at the visuospatial perspective-taking task than non-gamblers and healthy gamblers. Furthermore, we confirmed that visuospatial perspective-taking abilities predict empathy on the IRI dimensions of interpersonal perspective-taking and personal distress. The present study provides new evidence that reduced empathy is not limited to subjects with substance-related addictions; rather, it extends to behavioral addictions. Visuospatial perspective-taking may be a viable cognitive marker for use as a rehabilitation target of empathy.

The grounded nature of psychological perspective-taking.

Psychological perspective-taking is a powerful social cognition that helps us to understand other people. It creates feelings of closeness and sympathy, motivates us to help others, and is important for positive social relationships. In contrast to the impressive knowledge about its consequences, relatively little is known about how exactly people achieve them. The present paper addresses this question from a grounded cognition perspective, drawing on recent findings on the embodiment of visuospatial perspective-taking. Visuospatial perspective-taking involves a mental transformation of one's body schema into the physical location of another person. We argue that when people psychologically "put themselves in another person's shoes," this simulation of physical proximity happens, too, and is one source of perceived closeness. In five experiments (total N = 1067), participants completed a visuospatial perspective-taking task. During half of the trials, angular disparity between the target person and the participant was high and participants had to adopt the target's visual perspective (which involves an embodied simulation). During the remaining trials, angular disparity was low and participants could solve the task egocentrically. Taking another's perspective led participants to adopt the thoughts of the target person more strongly (Experiments 1-3) and increased the perceived similarity of that person to the self (Experiment 4) and participants' liking of that person (Experiment 5). These effects were independent of task difficulty (Experiment 2), and only present during trials where an embodied transformation happened (i.e., at high angular disparities; Experiment 3). Implications for psychological and visuospatial perspective-taking research and related phenomena are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Deliberate and spontaneous sensations of disembodiment: capacity or flaw?

ABSTRACTIntroduction: Hallucinations that involve shifts in the subjectively experienced location of the self, have been termed “out-of-body experiences” (OBEs). Early psychiatric accounts cast OBEs as a specific instance of depersonalisation and derealisation disorder (DPD-DR). However, during feelings of alienation and lack of body realism in DPD-DR the self is experienced within the physical body. Deliberate forms of “disembodiment” enable humans to imagine another’s visuo-spatial perspective taking (VPT), thus, if a strong relationship between deliberate and spontaneous forms of disembodiment could be revealed, then uncontrolled OBEs could be “the other side of the coin” of a uniquely human capacity.Methods: We present a narrative review of behavioural and neuroimaging work emphasising methodological and theoretical aspects of OBE and VPT research and a potential relationship.Results: Results regarding a direct behavioural relationship between VPT and OBE are mixed and we discuss reasons by pointing out the importance of using realistic tasks and recruiting genuine OBEers instead of general DPD-DR patients. Furthermore, we review neuroimaging evidence showing overlapping neural substrates between VPT and OBE, providing a strong argument for a relationship between the two processes.Conclusions: We conclude that OBE should be regarded as a necessary implication of VPT ability in humans, or even as a necessary and potentially sufficient condition for the evolution of VPT.

The effect of alcohol dependence on automatic visuo-spatial perspective taking

BackgroundAlcoholism is associated with cognitive deficits that affect social functioning. Previous research has shown that alcoholism is associated with deficits in conscious, deliberate social processing. However, little is known about whether alcoholism also affects rapid, spontaneous processing. We therefore investigated the extent to which alcoholism affects the ability to spontaneously adopt the viewpoint of another in a visuo-spatial perspective taking (VSPT) task. MethodsVSPT was measured in participants responding to a dot probe presented for 35ms alongside neutral faces, fearful faces and baseline stimuli (rectangles). ResultsNon alcohol dependent participants showed the standard reaction time cost to fearful faces, but not neutral faces relative to baseline. However, Alcohol dependent (AD) participants showed a reaction time cost to both fearful and neutral faces. ConclusionsAD participants are not impaired in their ability to automatically adopt the perspective of another. However, unlike non-AD participants, they show automatic perspective taking to both neutral and fearful faces.

When do humans spontaneously adopt another's visuospatial perspective?

Perspective-taking is a key component of social interactions. However, there is an ongoing controversy about whether, when and how instances of spontaneous visuospatial perspective-taking occur. The aim of this study was to investigate the underlying factors as well as boundary conditions that characterize the spontaneous adoption of another person's visuospatial perspective (VSP) during social interactions. We used a novel paradigm, in which a participant and a confederate performed a simple stimulus-response (SR) compatibility task sitting at a 90° angle to each other. In this set-up, participants would show a spatial compatibility effect only if they adopted the confederate's VSP. In a series of 5 experiments we found that participants reliably adopted the VSP of the confederate, as long as he was perceived as an intentionally acting agent. Our results therefore show that humans are able to spontaneously adopt the differing VSP of another agent and that there is a tight link between perspective-taking and performing actions together. The results suggest that spontaneous VSP-taking can effectively facilitate and speed up spatial alignment processes accruing from dynamic interactions in multiagent environments.

Spatial and Empathic Perspective-Taking Correlate on a Dispositional Level

Empathic perspective-taking is inevitably described using spatial locatives (“understanding a point of view”) and involves a metaphorical “merging of the self and other.” Visuo-spatial perspective-taking involves an actual embodied merging of the self and other. Yet, the two kinds of perspective-taking are treated as independent of each other. Four studies found that these two kinds of perspective-taking are related on a dispositional level. Individuals with high levels of empathic perspective-taking were better at imagining different views of the same object (Studies 1–3). This correlation could not be explained by general intelligence (Study 2) and was nominally stronger among participants who explicitly reported that they engaged in spatial perspective-taking (Study 3). Study 4 showed a correlation between empathic perspective-taking and performance on another spatial perspective-taking task. These relations can be explained by a shared mechanism of embodied self-rotation during all kinds of perspectiv...

Visuospatial perspective-taking in conversation and the role of bilingual experience

Little is known about how listeners use spatial perspective information to guide comprehension. Perspective-taking abilities have been linked to executive function in both children and adults. Bilingual children excel at perspective-taking tasks compared to their monolingual counterparts (e.g., Greenberg, Bellana, & Bialystok, 2013), possibly due to the executive function benefits conferred by the experience of switching between languages. Here we examine the mechanisms of visuo-spatial perspective-taking in adults, and the effects of bilingualism on this process. We report novel results regarding the ability of listeners to appreciate the spatial perspective of another person in conversation: While spatial perspective-taking does pose challenges, listeners rapidly accommodated the speaker’s perspective, in time to guide the on-line processing of the speaker’s utterances. Moreover, once adopted, spatial perspectives were enduring, resulting in costs when switching to a different perspective, even when that perspective is one’s own. In addition to these findings, direct comparison of monolingual and bilingual participants offer no support for the hypothesis that bilingualism improves the ability to appreciate the perspective of another person during language comprehension. In fact, in some cases adult bilinguals have significantly more difficulty with perspective-laden language.

Towards a Task-Aware Proactive Sociable Robot Based on Multi-state Perspective-Taking

Robots are expected to cooperate with humans in day-to-day interaction. One aspect of such cooperation is behaving proactively. In this paper we will enable our robots, equipped with visuo-spatial perspective-taking capabilities, to behave proactively based on reasoning ‘where’ its human partner might perform a particular task with different effort levels. For this, the robot analyzes the agents’ abilities not only from the current state but also from a set of different states the agent might attain.

Empathic and non-empathic routes to visuospatial perspective-taking

The present study examined whether strategy moderated the relationship between visuospatial perspective-taking and empathy. Participants (N=96) undertook both a perspective-taking task requiring speeded spatial judgements made from the perspective of an observed figure and the Empathy Quotient questionnaire, a measure of trait empathy. Perspective-taking performance was found to be related to empathy in that more empathic individuals showed facilitated performance particularly for figures sharing their own spatial orientation. This relationship was restricted to participants that reported perspective-taking by mentally transforming their spatial orientation to align with that of the figure; it was absent in those adopting an alternative strategy of transposing left and right whenever confronted with a front-view figure. Our finding that strategy moderates the relationship between empathy and visuospatial perspective-taking enables a reconciliation of the apparently inconclusive findings of previous studies and provides evidence for functionally dissociable empathic and non-empathic routes to visuospatial perspective-taking.

Observing fearful faces leads to visuo-spatial perspective taking

A number of recent studies suggested that visuo-spatial perspective taking (VSPT) occurs spontaneously when viewing either a human body or an action by an agent. However, it remains unclear whether VSPT is caused by the observation of an (potential) action or occurs because the observer infers from certain cues that another mind is present (whether actions/action cues are displayed or not). To examine whether action cues are necessary for VSPT, we presented to participants human faces without a torso, that is: stimuli that indicated the presence of another mind, without providing action (effector) cues. Furthermore, we examined whether ‘relevance’ of understanding the other mind would influence VSPT, where relevance was manipulated by comparing the effects of observing a fearful versus a neutral facial expression on VSPT. Results showed that spontaneous VSPT occurs when a face with a fearful, but not with a neutral, expression is perceived. This indicates that spontaneous VSPT occurs (at least more robustly) under circumstances, where VSPT is of ‘relevance’ for understanding the situation. Furthermore, directly observing actions, or action cues, does not appear to be a prerequisite for VSPT.

Empathy, schizotypy, and visuospatial transformations

Introduction. Adopting another person's visuospatial perspective has been associated with empathy, which involves adopting the psychological perspective of another individual. Both reduced empathy and abnormal visuospatial processing have been observed in those with schizophrenia and schizophrenia-related personality traits. In the current study, we sought to explore the relationship between empathy, schizotypy, and visuospatial transformation ability. Methods. 32 subjects (16 women) performed a visuospatial perspective-taking task and a mental letter rotation task. Response times and accuracy were analysed in relation to dimensions of self-reported empathy, indexed using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, and schizotypy, as measured by the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. Results. We found that: (1) greater cognitive and affective empathy were associated with reduced negative schizotypy, and, in men, greater cognitive empathy was associated with reduced positive schizotypy; (2) improved accuracy for imagined self–other transformations in the perspective-taking task was associated with greater self-reported cognitive empathy in women and higher positive schizotypy across genders; (3) faster mental letter rotation was associated with reduced cognitive empathy and increased negative schizotypy in women. Conclusions. Together, the findings partially support the commonalities in visuospatial transformation ability, empathy, and schizotypy, and posit an interesting link between spatial manipulations of our internal representations and interactions with the physical world.