Is Implicit Level-2 Visual perspective taking embodied? Perceptual simulation of others’ perspectives is not impaired by motor restriction.

Abstract

Embodied accounts of visual perspective taking suggest that judgements from another person’s perspective are less effortful if one’s own body position aligns with that of the other person, indicating a causal role of posture in visual perspective taking. Using our adapted mental rotation paradigm, here we tested whether movement has a causal role in perspective taking, by restricting participants’ movement in half of the experimental trials. Here we show, using our previously validated task, that the perceptual representation of another’s visual perspective is not influenced by participants’ ability to move. These data therefore rule out active physical movement as a causal explanation of visual perspective taking and instead argue that postural readjustments when making judgements from another’s perspective are a bodily consequence of the mental transformations of a person’s actual to imagined position in space.