People Do not Automatically Take the Level-1 Visual Perspective of Humanoid Robot Avatars

The influence of robot appearance on visual perspective taking: Testing the boundaries of the mere-appearance hypothesis

Visual perspective taking (VPT) is an integral part of social interactions. While the mechanisms of VPT have been extensively explored in human-human interactions, only a handful of studies have investigated the mechanisms that enable humans to also take the perspective of robots. Previous work has proposed that human-like visual features trigger VPT (mere-appearance hypothesis). In this study, we investigate the boundary conditions of the mere-appearance hypothesis in four experiments in a dot-matching task. We show that not only human-like visual features trigger VPT but that a camera also triggers VPT. Non-human animal-like features, conversely, do not result in VPT. We thus suggest that not only human-like visual features but also an object that is associated with an implied social presence (a camera) can trigger VPT whereas this is not the case for non-human animal-like features. These findings further extend earlier work on the mere-appearance hypothesis and are informative for designing social robots.

Spontaneous perspective-taking and its relation to schizotypy

INTRODUCTION

Patients with schizophrenia differ from healthy controls in the extent that they spontaneously take another's perspective. For such effects, it is difficult to separate the influence of schizophrenia from multiple potential confounders. Here, for the first time, associations between spontaneous perspective-taking and schizotypy were investigated in a nonclinical population.

METHODS

Adult participants completed both a Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ-BRU) and a novel online adaptation of a visual perspective-taking task that required participants to make judgements both from their own perspective and that of a human avatar.

RESULTS

Response times were elevated when the avatar's perspective was inconsistent with that of the participant, providing evidence of spontaneous perspective-taking. This demonstrates that the visual perspective-taking task can be successfully implemented in an online format. However, schizotypy did not predict these spontaneous perspective-taking effects.

CONCLUSIONS

Unlike explicit mentalising, this form of implicit mentalising is not affected by nonclinical manifestations of schizotypy traits. This implies that impairment of general neurocognitive function contributes to altered spontaneous perspective-taking in schizophrenia. A novel account based on the cognitive control processes involved in perspective selection and the role of attention in perspective calculation reconciles apparently contradictory findings of earlier studies comparing patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls.

No signs of automatic perspective-taking or its modulation by joint attention in toddlers using an object retrieval task

It is currently debated whether simple forms of social perspective-taking that are in place by late infancy are performed automatically. We conducted two experiments (N = 124) to test whether 3-year-olds show automatic perspective-taking during object searches, and whether automatic perspective-taking is facilitated by joint attention. Children were asked to retrieve an object immediately after it was moved from one (L1) to another (L2) location within a container, e.g. a sandbox. In Experiment 1, a between-subjects design was used, with children being randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: one in which child and other jointly attended to the object in L1 (joint attention condition); one in which the other was present but unengaged with the child when the object was placed in L1 (other present condition) and a baseline condition in which only the child was present (no other condition). Automatic perspective-taking should manifest in biased searches toward L1 in the other present and joint attention conditions, but not in the no other condition. No automatic perspective-taking was observed in either experiment, regardless of whether the other person left and remained absent (Experiment 1) or returned after the object was relocated (Experiment 2). The findings contribute to a growing body of empirical data that questions the existence of automatic perspective-taking.