Age of avatar modulates the altercentric bias in a visual perspective-taking task: ERP and behavioral evidence

Abstract

Despite being able to rapidly and accurately infer their own and other peoples’ visual perspectives, healthy adults experience difficulty ignoring the irrelevant perspective when the two perspectives are in conflict; they experience egocentric and altercentric interference. We examine for the first time how the age of an observed person (adult vs. child avatar) influences adults’ visual perspective-taking, particularly the degree to which they experience interference from their own or the other person’s perspective. Participants completed the avatar visual perspective-taking task, in which they verified the number of discs in a visual scene according to either their own or an on-screen avatar’s perspective (Experiments 1 and 2) or only from their own perspective (Experiment 3), where the two perspectives could be consistent or in conflict. Age of avatar was manipulated between (Experiment 1) or within (Experiments 2 and 3) participants, and interference was assessed using behavioral (Experiments 1–3) and ERP (Experiment 1) measures. Results revealed that altercentric interference is reduced or eliminated when a child avatar was present, suggesting that adults do not automatically compute a child avatar’s perspective. We attribute this pattern to either enhanced visual processing for own-age others or an inference on reduced mental awareness in younger children. The findings argue against a purely attentional basis for the altercentric effect, and instead support an account where both mentalising and directional processes modulate automatic visual perspective-taking, and perspective-taking effects are strongly influenced by experimental context.

Visual perspective taking is not automatic in a simplified Dot task

“…More recently, a number of studies replicated and extended the results of , which led to the conclusion that visual perspective taking is indeed an automatic process in humans (see Qureshi et al, 2010;Nielsen et al, 2015;Ferguson et al, 2017Ferguson et al, , 2018Furlanetto et al, 2016;Simpson et al, 2017). The altercentric interference observed in these studies has been interpreted as evidence that the mere presence of an avatar automatically triggers perspective taking (Surtees et al, 2016).…”

Avatars with faces of real people: A construction method for scientific experiments in virtual reality

“…First, studies have demonstrated that the realism of avatars is important for understanding human behaviour. Experiments on visual perspective taking, for example, show that humanness and the correspondence between avatar and participant affect interpretation of what the avatar can see (Ferguson et al, 2018;Nielsen et al, 2015). Second, by following our avatar construction method, it is possible to import avatars of real people into VR.…”

“…More generally, our avatars also hold broader application beyond that of face perception. For example, our avatar construction method could be used to generate useful stimuli for social psychological questions that can be explored in VR using avatars (see, e.g., Kane et al, 2012;Skulmowski et al, 2014;Slater & Steed, 1999), as well as cognitive studies in which the participant must simulate the visual perspective of somebody else (see, e.g., Begeer et al, 2010;Ferguson et al, 2018). Likewise, clinical research studies are increasingly utilising VR to enhance the real-world application of assessment tools (Bell et al, 2020), within which avatars already represent a key component (Mölbert et al, 2018;Powers et al, 2013).…”

Altercentric Cognition: How Others Influence Our Cognitive Processing

“…Another example of the shift between egocentricism and altercentrism is evident in the dot-perspective taking task where, if there exists a conflict in perspectives, participants are faster to judge the selfperspective (suggesting an egocentric bias) but if there is no conflict, participants are faster to judge the other's perspective (suggesting an altercentric bias) [56,156]. Egocentric interference, overall, tends to be more pronounced than altercentric interference but both effects appear to increase with more perceived similarity between self and other: egocentric interference is larger for in-group than for out-group members [157], and altercentric effects are reduced when the other differs in age from the respondent [158].…”