Flexible spatial perspective-taking: conversational partners weigh multiple cues in collaborative tasks

Abstract

Research on spatial perspective-taking often focuses on the cognitive processes of isolated individuals as they adopt or maintain imagined perspectives. Collaborative studies of spatial perspective-taking typically examine speakers' linguistic choices, while overlooking their underlying processes and representations. We review evidence from two collaborative experiments that examine the contribution of social and representational cues to spatial perspective choices in both language and the organization of spatial memory. Across experiments, speakers organized their memory representations according to the convergence of various cues. When layouts were randomly configured and did not afford intrinsic cues, speakers encoded their partner's viewpoint in memory, if available, but did not use it as an organizing direction. On the other hand, when the layout afforded an intrinsic structure, speakers organized their spatial memories according to the person-centered perspective reinforced by the layout's structure. Similarly, in descriptions, speakers considered multiple cues whether available a priori or at the interaction. They used partner-centered expressions more frequently (e.g., "to your right") when the partner's viewpoint was misaligned by a small offset or coincided with the layout's structure. Conversely, they used egocentric expressions more frequently when their own viewpoint coincided with the intrinsic structure or when the partner was misaligned by a computationally difficult, oblique offset. Based on these findings we advocate for a framework for flexible perspective-taking: people weigh multiple cues (including social ones) to make attributions about the relative difficulty of perspective-taking for each partner, and adapt behavior to minimize their collective effort. This framework is not specialized for spatial reasoning but instead emerges from the same principles and memory-depended processes that govern perspective-taking in non-spatial tasks.

Immediate and delayed recall of a small-scale spatial array

“…It is our view that the evidence shows that although the inherent structure of an array of objects can influence recall it would be premature to conclude that intrinsic cues are the primary determinant of recall performance. It appears that people consider multiple cues for reference frame selection, a notion consistent with evidence presented by Galati and Avraamides (2013).…”

Social and Representational Cues Jointly Influence Spatial Perspective‐Taking

“…With respect to the second question, in other work, we have examined specifically whether speakers' perspective choices are in fact successful at minimizing pairs' collective effort, as indicated by performance outcomes (Galati & Avraamides, ). By examining the number of conversational turns that pairs from the present corpus took to complete the task and the degree of distortion in their tabletop reconstructions, we confirmed that speakers' description strategies generally facilitated coordination.…”

Selection of macroreference frames in spatial memory

“…When learning occurred from two views, one aligned and one misaligned with the axes of the surrounding room, participants selected a reference frame parallel to the aligned view, and performance when imagining perspectives parallel to the misaligned view was no better than when imagining non experienced views. Those results, together with the body of research on spatial memory, indicate that reference frame selection is influenced by a conjunction of experience-based and environment-based factors (Galati & Avraamides, 2013;Hintzman, O'Dell, & Arndt, 1981;Kelly & McNamara, 2008;Kelly, Sjolund, & Sturz, 2013;Marchette, Yerramsetti, Burns, & Shelton, 2011;Meilinger, Riecke, & Bülthoff, 2014;Mou & McNamara, 2002;Street & Wang, 2014;Werner & Schmidt, 1999;Yamamoto & Shelton, 2005).…”