Perspective taking as virtual navigation? Perceptual simulation of what others see reflects their location in space but not their gaze

Abstract

Other peoples' (imagined) visual perspectives are represented perceptually in a similar way to our own, and can drive bottom-up processes in the same way as own perceptual input (Ward, Ganis & Bach, 2019). Here we test directly whether visual perspective taking is driven by where another person is looking, or whether these perceptual simulations represent their position in space more generally. Across two experiments, we asked participants to identify whether alphanumeric characters, presented at one of eight possible orientations away from upright, were presented normally, or in their mirror-inverted form (e.g. "R" vs. "Я"). In some scenes, a person would appear sitting to the left or the right of the participant. We manipulated either between-trials (Experiment 1) or between-subjects (Experiment 2), the gaze-direction of the inserted person, such that they either (1) looked towards the to-bejudged item, (2) averted their gaze away from the participant, or (3) gazed out towards the participant (Exp. 2 only). In the absence of another person, we replicated the well-established mental rotation effect, where recognition of items becomes slower the more items are oriented away from upright (e.g. Shepard and Meltzer, 1971). Crucially, in both experiments and in all conditions, this response pattern changed when another person was inserted into the scene. People spontaneously took the perspective of the other person and made faster judgements about the presented items in their presence if the characters were oriented towards upright to them. The gaze direction of this other person did not influence these effects. We propose that visual perspective taking is therefore a general spatial-navigational ability, allowing us to calculate more easily how a scene would (in principle) look from another position in space, and that such calculations reflect the spatial location of another person, but not their gaze.

‘Seeing’ proximal representations: Testing attitudes to the relationship between vision and images

“…The present work also speaks to the issue of visual perspective taking. A number of people have begun to argue that when humans assume another agent's perspective the representation on which this alternative viewpoint is based is depictive or 'quasi perceptual' [12,13]. Cole and Millett [14], and Cole, Millett [15] have however challenged this claim on theoretical grounds, and in a visual perspective-taking study based on the same stimuli as the present experiment adults also failed to judge that line closer to another agent would appear shorter [16].…”

The effects of body direction and posture on taking the perspective of a humanoid avatar in a virtual environment

“…In contrast, Ward et al [ 16 ] showed that the facilitation effect of perspective taking exists even when the avatar does not look at an object. This difference in the findings may be due to the fact that our avatar was placed facing away from the object with a full body including the head, but the avatar in Ward et al’s [ 16 ] study averted its gaze while its torso faced the object. Thus, the direction of the torso may be more important than the gaze direction.…”

“…Currently, it is not very clear how visual perspective taking works. There is debate over whether implicit visual perspective taking is automatic and spontaneous [ 12 – 16 ], or if it includes a conscious process [ 17 – 20 ]. Samson et al [ 12 ] showed that incongruent information from another person’s perspective interferes with performance in the Level 1 visual perspective taking task, even when the participant is ignoring that other person (altercentric intrusions).…”

“…They called it “perceptual simulation” of others’ viewing perspective [ 15 ]. In a following study, Ward et al [ 16 ] reported that the facilitation effect of another person does not require that person to be looking at an object. They concluded that visual perspective taking is a general spatial-navigational ability that is influenced by the spatial location of another person, but not their gaze.…”

Perception and Action in a Social Context

“…Some research has shown that the presence of another can also elicit spontaneous level-2 perspective-taking. Ward et al (2019Ward et al ( , 2020 asked participants to perform a mental rotation task that involves making judgements about an object rotated away from oneself. Participants usually have to respond according to some property that would be easier to detect if the object were upright from their perspective.…”