Perspective-Taking: In Search of a Theory

Abstract

Perspective-taking has been one of the central concerns of work on social attention and developmental psychology for the past 60 years. Despite its prominence, there is no formal description of what it means to represent another’s viewpoint. The present article argues that such a description is now required in the form of theory—a theory that should address a number of issues that are central to the notion of assuming another’s viewpoint. After suggesting that the mental imagery debate provides a good framework for understanding some of the issues and problems surrounding perspective-taking, we set out nine points that we believe any theory of perspective-taking should consider.

‘Seeing’ proximal representations: Testing attitudes to the relationship between vision and images

“…In sum, these results demonstrate the resistance adults have to entertaining proximal representations of vision. Overall, these results concur with other research, both theoretical and empirical, suggesting that adults do not tend to entertain vision in terms of truly 'depictive' imagery [5,14,15].…”

“…A number of people have begun to argue that when humans assume another agent's perspective the representation on which this alternative viewpoint is based is depictive or 'quasi perceptual' [12,13]. Cole and Millett [14], and Cole, Millett [15] have however challenged this claim on theoretical grounds, and in a visual perspective-taking study based on the same stimuli as the present experiment adults also failed to judge that line closer to another agent would appear shorter [16]. A depictive representation must, at the very least, code for the relative distances between different points in a scene [17], as seen by the other agent.…”

Visual perspective-taking and image-like representations: We don't see it

“…It is also clear when they state that perceptual simulation allows people to "recognize items that would be more difficult to recognize from their own perspective," (Ward et al, 2020). As Cole and colleagues Cole et al 2020) have pointed out, 'quasiperceptual' representations of a scene owes much to Kosslyn and colleagues' notion of mental imagery as being 'quasi-pictorial'. By this, Kosslyn et al meant that there is a one-to-one mapping of a representation to the real percept, thus explaining the classic mental imagery scanning results whereby the time it takes to 'move' from one point on an image to another increases with distance in a linear manner (Kosslyn, Pinker, Smith, & Shwartz, 1979).…”

“…As Cole and Millet make clear, much of these criticisms are a logical extension into the field of VPT of the 'great debate' over the plausibility of mental imagery that retains properties of its subject (Kosslyn, Ganis, & Thompson, 2001;Pylyshyn, 2003). Perceptual simulation, with its emphasis on imagery, is broadly in alignment with Kosslyn's view, and is therefore subject to the same advantages and criticisms that the original debate raised (see also Cole et al, 2020).…”

“…Visual perspective-taking (VPT) is crucial to our ability to understand, communicate, and deal with other agents (Brown-Schmidt, Gunlogson, & Tanenhaus, 2008;Clark & Brennan, 1991;Linde & Labov, 1975), yet there is currently no formal theory of VPT Cole, Millett, Samuel, & Eacott, 2020). A crucial challenge for any such theory is the representation problem; what exactly can we represent about another person's perspective when we assume a viewpoint?…”