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

Are visual artists better visual perspective takers? An exploratory study with an unexpected outcome

Visual perspective taking (VPT) has been argued to elicit image-like representations of other people's visual experiences. Separately, it has been demonstrated that there are inter-individual differences in the ability to successfully take other people's visual perspectives. In the present study, adults were asked to judge how long two lines appeared visually from the point of view of an agent. The lines were of identical length, but the agent was always closer to one of the lines than the other, meaning that the closer line should be judged as appearing visually longer. It was hypothesised that adults with experience in the visual arts would perform better at this task for one or both of two reasons: (1) they should be more familiar with the knowledge that the closer an object is the larger it appears visually (i.e., the retinal image is larger), and (2) they might be able to "draw" an image-like representation that more accurately reflects the effect of distance on perceived size. Consistent with previous experiments with this paradigm, adults generally failed to judge the closest line as appearing longer; indeed, as many judged this line would appear visually shorter. Crucially, increasing experience in the visual arts failed to improve the accuracy of VPT judgements; even a group of professional illustrators failed to recognise that the line closest to the agent would appear longer than the line furthest from the agent. These results are discussed in the context of the processes and representation types potentially involved in VPT.

Co-perceiving: Bringing the social into perception

Humans and other animals possess the remarkable ability to effectively navigate a shared perceptual environment by discerning which objects and spaces are perceived by others and which remain private to themselves. Traditionally, this capacity has been encapsulated under the umbrella of joint attention or joint action. In this comprehensive review, we advocate for a broader and more mechanistic understanding of this phenomenon, termed co-perception. Co-perception encompasses the sensitivity to the perceptual engagement of others and the capability to differentiate between objects perceived privately and those perceived commonly with others. It represents a distinct concept from mere simultaneous individual perception. Moreover, discerning between private and common objects doesn't necessitate intricate mind-reading abilities or mutual coordination. The act of perceiving objects as either private or common provides a comprehensive account for social scenarios where individuals simply share the same context or may even engage in competition. This conceptual framework encourages a re-examination of classical paradigms that demonstrate social influences on perception. Furthermore, it suggests that the impacts of shared experiences extend beyond affective responses, also influencing perceptual processes. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Attention Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science Philosophy > Psychological Capacities.

I prefer what you can see: The role of visual perspective-taking on the gaze-liking effect

Individuals' gaze on an object usually leads others to prefer that object, which is called the gaze-liking effect. However, it is still unclear whether this effect is driven by social factors (i.e., visual perspective-taking) or the domain-general processing (i.e., attention cueing). This research explored the mechanism of the gaze-liking effect by manipulating the objects' visibility to an avatar in six online one-shot experiments. The results showed that participants' affective evaluation for the object was modulated by the avatar's visual perspective. Specifically, the visible object to the avatar received a higher rating of liking degree. However, when the avatar was replaced with a non-social stimulus, the experimental effect was absent. Furthermore, the gaze-liking effect was robust while controlling for confounding factors such as the distance between the object and the avatar or type of stimuli. These findings provided convincing evidence that the gaze-liking effect involves a process of the other's visual experience and is not merely a by-product of the gaze-cueing effect.

Embodied Cross-Modal Interactions Based on an Altercentric Reference Frame

Accurate comprehension of others' thoughts and intentions is crucial for smooth social interactions, wherein understanding their perceptual experiences serves as a fundamental basis for this high-level social cognition. However, previous research has predominantly focused on the visual modality when investigating perceptual processing from others' perspectives, leaving the exploration of multisensory inputs during this process largely unexplored. By incorporating auditory stimuli into visual perspective-taking (VPT) tasks, we have designed a novel experimental paradigm in which the spatial correspondence between visual and auditory stimuli was limited to the altercentric rather than the egocentric reference frame. Overall, we found that when individuals engaged in explicit or implicit VPT to process visual stimuli from an avatar's viewpoint, the concomitantly presented auditory stimuli were also processed within this avatar-centered reference frame, revealing altercentric cross-modal interactions.

It's Not You, It's Me: A Review of Individual Differences in Visuospatial Perspective Taking

Visuospatial perspective taking (VSPT) concerns the ability to understand something about the visual relationship between an agent or observation point on the one hand and a target or scene on the other. Despite its importance to a wide variety of other abilities, from communication to navigation, and decades of research, there is as yet no theory of VSPT. Indeed, the heterogeneity of results from different (and sometimes the same) VSPT tasks point to a complex picture suggestive of multiple VSPT strategies, individual differences in performance, and context-specific factors that together have a bearing on both the efficiency and accuracy of outcomes. In this article, we review the evidence in search of patterns in the data. We found a number of predictors of VSPT performance but also a number of gaps in understanding that suggest useful pathways for future research and, possibly, a theory (or theories) of VSPT. Overall, this review makes the case for understanding VSPT by better understanding the perspective taker rather than the target agents or their perception.

Visuospatial and Affective Perspective-Taking

Abstract. Perspective-taking is the ability to intuit another person’s mental state. Historically, cognitive and affective perspective-taking are distinguished from visuospatial perspective-taking because the content these processes operate on is too dissimilar. However, all three share functional similarities. Following recent research showing relations between cognitive and visuospatial perspective-taking, this article explores links between visuospatial and affective perspective-taking. Data of three preregistered experiments suggest that visuospatial perspective-taking does not improve emotion recognition speed and only slightly increases emotion recognition accuracy (Experiment 1), yet visuospatial perspective-taking increases the perceived intensity of emotional expressions (Experiment 2), as well as the emotional contagiousness of negative emotions (Experiment 3). The implications of these findings for content-based, cognitive, and functional taxonomies of perspective-taking and related processes are discussed.

Spontaneous perspective taking toward robots: The unique impact of humanlike appearance

As robots rapidly enter society, how does human social cognition respond to their novel presence? Focusing on one foundational social-cognitive capacity-visual perspective taking-seven studies reveal that people spontaneously adopt a robot's unique perspective and do so with patterns of variation that mirror perspective taking toward humans. As they do with humans, people take a robot's visual perspective when it displays goal-directed actions. Moreover, perspective taking is absent when the agent lacks human appearance, increases when the agent looks highly humanlike, and persists even when the humanlike agent is perceived as eerie or as obviously lacking a mind. These results suggest that visual perspective taking toward robots is consistent with a "mere appearance hypothesis"-a form of stimulus generalization based on humanlike appearance-rather than following an "uncanny valley" pattern or arising from mind perception. Robots' superficial human resemblance may trigger and modulate social-cognitive responses in human observers originally developed for human interaction.

The effects of body direction and posture on taking the perspective of a humanoid avatar in a virtual environment

Visual perspective taking is inferring how the world looks to another person. To clarify this process, we investigated whether employing a humanoid avatar as the viewpoint would facilitate an imagined perspective shift in a virtual environment, and which factor of the avatar is effective for the facilitation effect. We used a task that involved reporting how an object looks by a simple direction judgment, either from the avatar’s position or from the position of an empty chair. We found that the humanoid avatar’s presence improved task performance. Furthermore, the avatar’s facilitation effect was observed only when the avatar was facing the visual stimulus to be judged; performance was worse when it faced backwards than when there was only an empty chair facing forwards. This suggests that the avatar does not simply attract spatial attention, but the posture of the avatar is crucial for the facilitation effect. In addition, when the directions of the head and the torso were opposite (i.e., an impossible posture), the avatar’s facilitation effect disappeared. Thus, visual perspective taking might not be facilitated by the avatar when its posture is biomechanically impossible because we cannot embody it. Finally, even when the avatar’s head of the possible posture was covered with a bucket, the facilitation effect was found with the forward-facing avatar rather than the backward-facing avatar. That is, the head/gaze direction cue, or presumably the belief that the visual stimulus to be judged can be seen by the avatar, was not required. These results suggest that explicit perspective taking is facilitated by embodiment towards humanoid avatars.

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

Corrections applied by the visual system, like size constancy, provide us with a coherent and stable perspective from ever-changing retinal images. In the present experiment we investigated how willing adults are to examine their own vision as if it were an uncorrected 2D image, much like a photograph. We showed adult participants two lines on a wall, both of which were the same length but one was closer to the participant and hence appeared visually longer. Despite the instruction to base their judgements on appearance specifically, approximately half of the participants judged the lines to appear the same. When they took a photo of the lines and were asked how long they appeared in the image their responses shifted; now the closer line appeared longer. However, when they were asked again about their own view they reverted to their original response. These results suggest that many adults are resistant to imagining their own vision as if it were a flat image. We also place these results within the context of recent views on visual perspective-taking.