Reasoning About Visibility in Mirrors: A Comparison Between a Human Observer and a Camera

Abstract

Human observers make errors when predicting what is visible in a mirror. This is true for perception with real mirrors as well as for reasoning about mirrors shown in diagrams. We created an illustration of a room, a top-down view, with a mirror on a wall and objects (nails) on the opposite wall. The task was to select which nails were visible in the mirror from a given position (viewpoint). To study the importance of the social nature of the viewpoint, we divided the sample ( N = 108) in two groups. One group ( n = 54) were tested with a scene in which there was the image of a person. The other group ( n = 54) were tested with the same scene but with a camera replacing the person. Participants were instructed to think about what would be captured by a camera on a tripod. This manipulation tests the effect of social perspective-taking in reasoning about mirrors. As predicted, performance on the task shows an overestimation of what can be seen in a mirror and a bias to underestimate the role of the different viewpoints, that is, a tendency to treat the mirror as if it captures information independently of viewpoint. In terms of the comparison between person and camera, there were more errors for the camera, suggesting an advantage for evaluating a human viewpoint as opposed to an artificial viewpoint. We suggest that social mechanisms may be involved in perspective-taking in reasoning rather than in automatic attention allocation.

The closing of the theory of mind: A critique of perspective-taking

“…This is not to say that many authors within this field do not refer to and examine the computation of the relative positions of humans and objects. Indeed, there does seem to be something qualitatively different about representing a scene from a different position when that position is occupied by another human as opposed to an inanimate object (e.g., Bertamini & Soranzo, 2018;Tversky & Hard, 2009). We do, however, suggest, or perhaps remind authors, that it is not possible to take the perspective, the percept, of another person.…”

“…Result showed that the number was reported from the direction/viewpoint of the chair to the same degree as when an agent sat in the chair. As noted previously, however, this is not to say that there is nothing special about having an agent in a display when observers are asked to make judgements that rely on the coding of spatial relationships (e.g., Becchio, Del Giudice, Dal Monte, Latini-Corazzini, & Pia, 2013;Bertamini & Soranzo, 2018;Tversky & Hard, 2009). Thus, a nonhuman reference point may not induce effects to the same degree as a human agent.…”

“…Few non-RT experiments exist in the perspectivetaking literature. Examples include a variant of the ambiguous number paradigm (Zhao et al, 2015), change-detection experiments (Cole et al, 2015;Morgan et al, 2018), the assessment of what can be seen in a mirror (Bertamini & Soranzo, 2018), and a variant of the "sandbox" assessment of false belief (Marshall, Gollwitzer, & Santos, 2018).…”

The Role of Perspective Taking on Attention: A Review of the Special Issue on the Reflexive Attentional Shift Phenomenon

“…Therefore, it will be important going forward for researchers to be specific about which type of perspective-taking is under examination. Lastly, evidence from the current issue suggests that certain effects might depend on the cognitive demand of the experimental task [19,34,49], which indicates that social factors are involved when the task is cognitively demanding, while they may not be necessary in other cases.…”

Perspective-Taking: In Search of a Theory

“…When a human agent is present in a display, responses on a variety of tasks are facilitated (e.g., [ 59 ]). It is not yet clear what exactly the agent provides that a non-agent does not.…”