Out of your sight, out of my mind: Knowledge about another person’s visual access modulates spontaneous visuospatial perspective-taking.

Abstract

Accumulating evidence suggests that humans spontaneously adopt each other's visuospatial perspective (VSP), but many aspects about the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate whether knowledge about another's visual access systematically modulates spontaneous VSP-taking. In a spatial compatibility task, a participant and a confederate sat at a 90°angle to each other, with visual stimuli being aligned vertically for the participants and horizontally for the confederate. In this task, VSP-taking is reflected in a spatial compatibility effect in the participant, because stimulus-response compatibility occurs only if the participant takes the confederate's perspective. We manipulated the visual access of the confederate during the task by means of glasses with adjustable shutters that allowed or prevented the confederate from seeing the visual stimuli. The results of 2 experiments showed that people only adopted their task partner's VSP if that person had unhindered visual access to the stimuli. Provided that the confederate had visual access to the participant's stimuli, VSP-taking occurred regardless of whether the confederate performed the same visual task as the participant (Experiment 1) or a different, auditory task (Experiment 2). The results suggest that knowledge about another's visual access is pivotal for triggering spontaneous VSP-taking, whereas having the same task is not. We discuss the possibility that spontaneous VSP-taking can effectively facilitate spatial alignment processes in social interaction. (PsycINFO Database Record

Visual perspective taking for avatars in a Simon task

“…Although perspective taking was not required to solve the task used in their study, Freundlieb et al (2016) still found evidence for it. In a later experiment, they demonstrated that this process is modulated by the targeted person's visual access and is only present when the confederate can actually see the stimuli (Freundlieb, Sebanz, & Kovács, 2017). On the basis of these results, it seems that level 1 perspective taking could be a precursor for level 2 perspective taking.…”

Close interpersonal proximity modulates visuomotor processing of object affordances in shared, social space

“…Perhaps actor pairs standing opposite one another only take the other's perspective when acting in a collaborative task or context, as in studies by Frischen et al (2009) and Surtees et al (2016). Freundlieb and colleagues (Freundlieb, Kovács, & Sebanz, 2016;Freundlieb, Sebanz, & Kovács, 2017) have in fact demonstrated strong evidence for perspective taking when both actors are independently identifying the location of a target stimulus; however, in these experiments the confederate was sitting at a 90°angle to the participant and in most cases the stimulus display was spatially congruent with the confederate's response configuration, and never with the participant's. Further research is needed to determine which conditions are necessary to elicit a perspective taking mechanism and, moreover, how this process interacts with social space coding.…”

How attention gates social interactions

“…Consistently, socialattentional behaviors also appear to be contingent on the agent's ability to unobstructively see their environment. Both laboratory and real‐world studies show that the spontaneous orienting toward an inferred agent's mental perspective is modulated by the perceived ability of the agent to see the available objects, with reduced and even abolished orienting when the agent's line of sight is occluded . Further, others’ ability to see the environment also appears to be important for determining the extent to which a gaze cue is interpreted as conveying intentional gaze–object relationships, with attentional responses to social cues being reduced when those relationships are absent or weakened .…”