Is implicit Level-2 visual perspective-taking embodied? Spontaneous perceptual simulation of others’ perspectives is not impaired by motor restriction

Ward, Eleanor, Ganis, Giorgio, McDonough, Katrina L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7599-8317 and Bach, Patric (2022) Is implicit Level-2 visual perspective-taking embodied? Spontaneous perceptual simulation of others’ perspectives is not impaired by motor restriction. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 75 (7). pp. 1244-1258. ISSN 1747-0218

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Abstract

Visual perspective taking may rely on the ability to mentally rotate one’s own body into that of another. Here, we test whether participants’ ability to make active body movements plays a causal role in visual perspective taking. We utilised our recent task that measures whether participants spontaneously represent another’s visual perspective in a (quasi-)perceptual format that can drive own perceptual decision making. Participants reported whether alphanumeric characters, presented in different orientations, are shown in their normal or mirror-inverted form (e.g., “R” vs. “Я”). Between trials, we manipulated whether another person was sitting either left or right of the character and whether participants’ movement was restricted with a chinrest or whether they could move freely. As in our previous research, participants spontaneously took the visual perspective of the other person, recognising rotated letters more rapidly when they appeared upright to the other person in the scene, compared with when they faced away from that person, and these effects increased with age but were (weakly) negatively related to schizotypy and not to autistic traits or social skills. Restricting participants’ ability to make active body movements did not influence these effects. The results, therefore, rule out that active physical movement plays a causal role in computing another’s visual perspective, either to create alignment between own and other’s perspective or to trigger perspective taking processes. The postural adjustments people sometimes make when making judgements from another’s perspective may instead be a bodily consequence of mentally transforming one’s actual to an imagined position in space.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Funding Information: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: E.W. was funded by a PhD student grant from the University of Plymouth. Publisher Copyright: © Experimental Psychology Society 2022.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	active inference,mental imagery,mental rotation,mentalising,navigation,perceptual simulation,perspective-taking,submentalising,visual perspective taking,physiology,neuropsychology and physiological psychology,experimental and cognitive psychology,psychology(all),physiology (medical) ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1300/1314
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	04 Mar 2024 18:39
Last Modified:	04 Mar 2024 18:39
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/94562
DOI:	10.1177/17470218221077102

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