Observing the world from the perspective of others is one of the important foundational skills of social cognition. Visual perspective taking (VPT) is usually considered to have occurred when seeing another person. In researches on automatic VPT, a critical question is, does VPT occur merely based on another person's realistic perspective at the current moment, or does it also consider potential future perspectives? To examine the taking-a-potential-perspective assumption, the current study created a series of situations in which others are currently out of our sight (thus, extinguishing the information about the current perspective), with the possibility of returning and seeing a target from a different perspective than the participants, to test whether participants would spontaneously take the perspective of the temporarily invisible person. The experiments found that both the Level-1 and Level-2 VPT occurred for a person who was occluded from a participants' view, and VPT was more likely to occur when the person was more likely to return. These results suggest that people would not only spontaneously take others' current perspectives, but also the potential perspectives, thus future social interactions could be facilitated by the preprocessed perspectives of others. Public Significance StatementAs an important skill of social cognition, visual perspective taking (VPT) has been studied a lot. Consensus has been reached on many aspects but several critical debates remain, especially on whether VPT reflect a spontaneously (or automatically) process of mentalizing. Despite of the theoretical controversy, both sides seem to be based on a common assumption: VPT is determined merely by what another can see in the specific present moment, which could be a reason of the mixed findings of this line of research. We examined an alternative assumption: VPT would also occur based on another person's potential perspective in the future, finding that even when the person was currently invisible, VPT would occur when the target was likely be seen by the person later. This taking-a-potential-perspective assumption gives new insight into how spontaneous VPT works and functions in social interactions, and helps to explain the conflict results of previous studies.

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