No abstract

Previous research has shown that calculating if something is to someone’s left or right involves a simulative process recruiting representations of our own body in imagining ourselves in the position of the other person (Kessler and Rutherford, 2010). We compared left and right judgements from another’s spatial position (spatial perspective judgements) to judgements of how a numeral appeared from another’s point of view (visual perspective judgements). Experiment 1 confirmed that these visual and spatial perspective judgements involved a process of rotation as they became more difficult with angular disparity between the self and other. There was evidence of some difference between the two, but both showed a linear pattern. Experiment 2 went a step further in showing that these judgements used embodied self rotations, as their difficulty was also dependent on the current position of the self within the world. This effect was significantly stronger in spatial perspective-taking, but was present in both cases. We conclude that embodied self-rotations, through which we actively imagine ourselves assuming someone else’s position in the world can subserve not only reasoning about where objects are in relation to someone else but also how the objects in their environment appear to them.

Children (aged 6–10) and adults (total N = 136) completed a novel visual perspective‐taking task that allowed quantitative comparisons across age groups. All age groups found it harder to judge the other person’s perspective when it differed from their own. This egocentric interference did not decrease with age, even though, overall, performance improved. In addition, it was more difficult to judge one’s own perspective when it differed from that of the other person, suggesting that the other’s perspective was processed even though it interfered with self‐perspective judgments. In a logically equivalent, nonsocial task, the same degree of interference was not observed. These findings are discussed in relation to recent findings suggesting precocious theory‐of‐mind abilities in infancy.

Neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies implicate both frontal and temporoparietal cortices when humans reason about the mental states of others. Here, we report an event-related potentials study of the time course of one such “theory of mind” ability: visual perspective taking. The findings suggest that posterior cortex, perhaps the temporoparietal cortex, calculates and represents the perspective of self versus other, and then, later, the right frontal cortex resolves conflict between perspectives during response selection.