Visual perspective taking is not automatic in a simplified Dot task (original) (raw)
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NeuroImage, 2015
Visual perspective taking is a fundamental feature of the human social brain. Previous research has mainly focused on explicit visual perspective taking and contrasted brain activation for other- versus self-perspective judgments. This produced a conceptual gap to theory of mind studies, where researchers mainly compared activation for taking another's mental perspective to non-mental control conditions. We compared brain activation for visual perspective taking to activation for non-mental control conditions where the avatar was replaced by directional (arrow, lamp) or non-directional (brick-wall) objects. We found domain-specific activation linked to the avatar's visual perspective in right TPJ, ventral mPFC and ventral precuneus. Interestingly, we found that these areas are spontaneously processing information linked to the other's perspective during self-perspective judgments. Based on a review of the visual perspective taking literature, we discuss how these finding...
Attribution of vision and knowledge in ‘spontaneous perspective taking’
Psychological Research, 2019
Theory of mind is a ubiquitous notion that permeates many aspects of social cognition. A recent application has been in the context of 'spontaneous perspective taking' in which responses to target stimuli are facilitated if a human agent, present in a display, sees the same stimuli as an experimental participant. In the present work, we replicated results from a paradigm purporting to show such perspective taking in which participants tend to judge an ambiguous number from the position of an agent. We find, however (in Experiment 1) that this effect still occurs even when the agent cannot see the number due to an occluding object. This, therefore, does not support the perspective-taking hypothesis. An alternative explanation to the theory of mind account is posited in which the agent acts as a reference point that cues the observer to view the critical stimuli from that position and in the direction to which the agent faces. We test this hypothesis in Experiments 2 and 3, and show that non-human reference points can generate perspective-taking-like data. Overall, these results do not support the theory of mind account of previous studies.
NeuroImage, 2018
There is an ongoing debate about the involvement of Theory of Mind (ToM) processes in Visual Perspective Taking (VPT). In an fMRI study (Schurz et al., 2015), we borrowed the positive features from a novel VPT task - which is widely used in behavioral research - to study previously overlooked experimental factors in neuroimaging studies. However, as Catmur et al. (2016) rightly argue in a comment on our work, our data do not speak strongly to questions discussed in the original behavioral studies, in particular the issue of implicit mentalizing. We appreciate the clarification of these interpretational limitations of our study, but would like to point out the differences between questions emerging from behavioral and neuroimaging research on VPT. Different from what Catmur et al. (2016) discuss, our study was not intended as a test of implicit mentalizing. In fact, the terms "automatic" and "implicit mentalizing" were never mentioned in our manuscript. Our study ...
Cognition, 2010
Previous research suggests that perspective-taking and other ''theory of mind'' processes may be cognitively demanding for adult participants, and may be disrupted by concurrent performance of a secondary task. In the current study, a Level-1 visual perspective task was administered to 32 adults using a dual-task paradigm in which the secondary task tapped executive function. Results suggested that the secondary task did not affect the calculation of perspective, but did affect the selection of the relevant (Self or Other) perspective for a given trial. This is the first direct evidence of a cognitively efficient process for ''theory of mind'' in adults that operates independently of executive function. The contrast between this and previous findings points to a distinction between simple perspective-taking and the more complex and cognitively demanding abilities more typically examined in studies of ''theory of mind''. It is suggested that these findings may provide a parsimonious explanation of the success of infants on 'indirect' measures of perspective-taking that do not explicitly require selection of the relevant perspective.
First-Person Perspective Effects on Theory of Mind without Self-Reference
PLoS ONE, 2011
This study examined dissociations between brain networks involved in theory of mind, which is needed for guessing others' mental states, and the self, which might constitute the basis for theory of mind's development. We used event-related fMRI to compare a condition that required participants to guess the mental state of a subject featured in first-person perspective sentences (1stPP condition) with a third-person perspective sentence condition (3rdPP condition). The caudate nucleus was marginally more activated in the 1stPP than in the 3rdPP condition, while the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was significantly more activated in the 3rdPP condition as compared to the 1stPP condition. Furthermore, we examined the correlation between activation (signal intensity) of the caudate nucleus and left DLPFC with that of the right DLPFC, which is thought to be closely connected with sense of self. We found a significant correlation between caudate nucleus and right DLPFC activation in the 1stPP condition, and between left and right DLPFC activation in the 3rdPP condition. Although theory of mind and the self both appear to recruit the right DLPFC, this region seems to be accessed through the left DLPFC during theory of mind tasks, but through the caudate nucleus when tasks require self reference.
Perspective taking in children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential correction
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2004
Children generally behave more egocentrically than adults when assessing anothers perspective. We argue that this difference does not, however, indicate that adults process information less egocentrically than children, but rather that adults are better able to subsequently correct an initial egocentric interpretation. An experiment tracking participants eye movements during a referential communication task indicated that children and adults were equally quick to interpret a spoken instruction egocentrically but differed in the speed with which they corrected that interpretation and looked at the intended (i.e., non-egocentric) object. The existing differences in egocentrism between children and adults therefore seems less a product of where people start in their perspective taking process than where they stop, with lingering egocentric biases among adults produced by insufficient correction of an automatic moment of egocentrism. We suggest that this pattern of similarity in automatic, but not controlled, processes may explain between-group differences in a variety of dual-process judgments.
Submentalizing or mentalizing in a Level 1 perspective-taking task: A cloak and goggles test
It has been proposed that humans possess an automatic system to represent mental states (‘implicit mentalizing’). The existence of an implicit mentalizing system has generated considerable debate however, centred on the ability of various experimental paradigms to demonstrate unambiguously such mentalizing. Evidence for implicit mentalizing has previously been provided by the ‘dot perspective task’, where participants are slower to verify the number of dots they can see when an avatar can see a different number of dots. However, recent evidence challenged a mentalizing interpretation of this effect by showing it was unaltered when the avatar was replaced with an inanimate arrow stimulus. Here we present an extension of the dot perspective task using an invisibility cloaking device to render the dots invisible on certain trials. This paradigm is capable of providing unambiguous evidence of automatic mentalizing, but no such evidence was found. Two further well-powered experiments used opaque and transparent goggles to manipulate visibility but found no evidence of automatic mentalizing, nor of individual differences in empathy or perspective-taking predicting performance, contradicting previous studies using the same design. The results cast doubt on the existence of an implicit mentalizing system, suggesting that previous effects were due to domain-general processes.
Recent findings from new implicit looking time tasks indicate that children show anticipatory looking patterns suggesting false belief processing from very early on; however, systematic and independent tests of their replicability and their convergent validity are still outstanding. The current paper reports three studies from two independent research labs that attempted to test the replicability and convergent validity (using correlation analyses) of the Southgate et al. (2007) and the Surian and Geraci (2012) paradigms. Results showed that the original findings can neither be replicated in children nor in elderly adults, and can only partially be replicated in adults. Furthermore, the two different paradigms did not correlate, which puts into question the convergent validity of these tasks as tapping the same capacity of an implicit Theory of Mind. In conclusion, the present studies suggest that the results from implicit Theory of Mind tasks should be treated with caution.
2021
Visuospatial perspective-taking (VPT) is a process of imagining what can be seen and how a scene looks from a location and orientation in space that differs from one's own. It comprises two levels that are underpinned by distinct neurocognitive processes. Level-2 VPT is often studied in relation to two other cognitive phenomena, object mental rotation (oMR) and theory of mind (ToM). With the aim to describe the broad picture of neurocognitive processes underlying level-2 VPT, here we give an overview of the recent behavioral and neuroscientific findings of level-2 VPT. We discuss its relation to level-1 VPT, which is also referred to as perspective-tracking, and the neighboring topics, oMR and ToM. Neuroscientific research shows that level-2 VPT is a diverse cognitive process, encompassing functionally distinct neural circuits. It shares brain substrates with oMR, especially those parietal brain areas that are specialized in spatial reasoning. However, compared to oMR, level-2 V...