Online level-2 perspective taking for newly learnt symbols

Abstract

Humans demonstrate spontaneous sensitivity to other people’s perspectives on object identities in online tasks. Evidence shows that this not only involves representing the mere discrepancy between perspectives, but the content of such perspectives as well (level-2 perspective taking/L2PT). However, this evidence comes from studies using culturally grounded symbols which leaves open the possibility that having extensive, easily accessible background knowledge about an object is necessary for the L2PT effect. Experiment 1 tested this by comparing L2PT across two groups: one performing a verification task on Arabic numbers, and one on newly learnt symbol-label pairs. In both groups, half of the visual stimuli was symmetrical, while half was asymmetrical. In both cases, there was a joint condition: participants performed the task in parallel with a partner, observing stimuli from opposite angles, thus having conflicting interpretations for asymmetric characters. Furthermore, they also performed the verification task individually, while their partner had no visual access to the stimuli. We found an interference effect in both groups. However, while the effect was stable in the number group, it diminished over time in the symbol group. Experiments 2a and 2b demonstrated that the complexity of the recently learnt symbols has an influence on spontaneous L2PT: the same procedure with more complex symbols did not elicit any interference effect. Our results show that online L2PT is not limited to objects that participants have proficiency in identifying. Nevertheless, the L2PT effect seems to diminish when participants have to process increasingly complex novel symbols.