Does altercentric interference rely on mentalizing?: Results from two level-1 perspective-taking tasks

Comparing self-other distinction across motor, cognitive and affective domains

The self-other distinction (SOD) is a process by which humans disentangle self from other-related mental representations. This online study investigated two unresolved questions: (i) whether partially the same processes underpin SOD for motor, cognitive and affective representations, and (ii) whether SOD overlaps with domain-general cognitive control processes. Participants (N = 243) performed three SOD tasks (motor: automatic imitation inhibition (AIT); cognitive: visual perspective-taking (VPT); affective: emotional egocentricity bias (av-EEB) tasks) and two cognitive control tasks (Stroop and stop-signal reaction time (SSRT) tasks). Correlation analyses showed no associations among the motor, cognitive and affective SOD indexes. Similarly, distinct SOD clusters emerged in the hierarchical clustering dendrogram, indicating clear separations among SODs. However, the results of multidimensional scaling suggested a tendency towards two clusters, as evidenced by the proximity of AIT and VPT indexes in relation to EEB indexes. AIT spatial laterality and Stroop domain-general cognitive control confounded AIT and VPT indexes, albeit slightly differently depending on the analysis method used. SSRT showed neither associations with SODs nor with other domain-general indexes. These findings underscore the complexity of SOD processes and have notable implications for basic and applied research, e.g. in the domain of clinical disorders affected by deficiencies in SOD.

Spontaneous visual perspective-taking with constant attention cue: A modified dot-perspective task paradigm

It has been argued that humans can employ mentalizing implicitly and automatically, even with others' visual experiences. In terms of visual perspective-taking (i.e., inferring another's visual experience), the Dot Perspective Task has been considered to provide evidence for this hypothesis. People were found to respond slower when their visual experience was inconsistent with others' (referred to as the consistency effect). However, the specific underlying cognitive process of the consistency effect has been a topic of intense debate, i.e., whether the consistency effect represents a process of social cognition such as mentalizing. Here, we introduce a modified version of the Dot Perspective Task, in which all the targets appear at the position where the avatar is gazing, while some of the targets are invisible to the avatar due to a barrier that may block the avatar's line of sight. Therefore, the effect of perspective-taking and attention-cueing can be better disassociated in the modified paradigm. The results of Experiment 1 illustrated a significant consistency effect, which was further confirmed in Experiment 2. More importantly, the consistency effect was absent in Experiment 3, where the avatar sat with his back to the participants. These findings imply that the consistency effect reflects the automatic computation of others' visual information, and rule out the attention-cueing account of the consistency 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.

Evidence against implicit belief processing in a blindfold task

Understanding what other people think is crucial to our everyday interactions. We seem to be affected by the perspective of others even in situations where it is irrelevant to us. This intrusion from others' perspectives has been referred to as altercentric bias and has been suggested to reflect implicit belief processing. There is an ongoing debate about how robust such altercentric effects are and whether they indeed reflect true mentalizing or result from simpler, domain-general processes. As a critical test for true mentalizing, the blindfold manipulation has been proposed. That is, participants are familiarized with a blindfold that is either transparent or opaque. When they then observe a person wearing this blindfold, they can only infer what this person can or cannot see based on their knowledge of the blindfold's transparency. Here, we used this blindfold manipulation to test whether participants' reaction times in detecting an object depended on the agent's belief about the object's location, itself manipulated with a blindfold. As a second task, we asked participants to detect where the agent was going to look for the object. Across two experiments with a large participant pool (N = 234) and different settings (online/lab), we found evidence against altercentric biases in participants' response times in detecting the object. We did, however, replicate a well-documented reality congruency effect. When asked to detect the agent's action, in turn, participants were biased by their own knowledge of where the object should be, in line with egocentric biases previously found in false belief reasoning. These findings suggests that altercentric biases do not reflect belief processing but lower-level processes, or alternatively, that implicit belief processing does not occur when the belief needs to be inferred from one's own experience.

Closeness impeded self-perspective inhibition whereas facilitated explicit perspective calculation

This study examined whether and how closeness affected the calculation and selection processes underlying perspective taking. Using the visual dot perspective taking task, we introduced a close friend and a stranger from the participants' university as the perspective-taking targets. Friend and stranger trials were mixed in a block in Experiment 1 but separated in different blocks in Experiment 2. Results revealed a significant effect of closeness on egocentric but not altercentric interference. The analyses on other-consistent and other-inconsistent trials suggested that closeness impeded responding from the avatar's perspective when self and other perspectives differed but facilitated responding from the avatar's perspective when self and other perspectives were consistent. However, the analyses on self-consistent and self-inconsistent trials revealed that the processing cost induced by implicit perspective calculation and other-inhibition was comparable between friends and strangers. These suggested that closeness selectively impeded self-perspective inhibition whereas facilitated explicit perspective calculation.

Tracking multiple perspectives: Spontaneous computation of what individuals in high entitative groups see

Perspective-taking ability is crucial for supporting social interactions. It has been widely suggested that the calculation of an individual's perspective is spontaneous. Nevertheless, people typically engage with more than one individual, and computing what individuals in a crowd see is important. The current study explored whether people spontaneously compute the perspectives of individuals displayed in a crowd. The classic visual perspective-taking task was adopted, but the picture of the room was presented with four human avatars facing two walls. The results showed that if the crowd of individuals was treated as a high entitative group, when none of the perspectives of the individuals contained the same number of discs as that from the perspective of the participant, the judgment of the participant's perspective was slower than when a proportion of the perspectives of the individuals displayed in the crowd were consistent with the participant's perspective, even if the perspectives of the multiple individuals in a crowd were not explicitly noticed. This altercentric intrusion effect was not present when the crowd had low entitativity. These findings were replicated by using different methods to operationalize group entitativity. Hence, this study demonstrates that spontaneously tracking the perspectives of individuals displayed in a crowd has a boundary condition and that people can spontaneously compute what individuals in high entitative groups see.

Exploring neurophysiological markers of visual perspective taking: Methodological considerations

RATIONALE

For visual perspective taking (VPT) using the avatar task, examinations of neural processes using event related potentials (ERP) indicate a distinction between an early posterior perspective calculation process (P3) and a later frontal process (LFSW) managing perspective conflict. While it is unknown if these neural processes are affected in clinical populations, it is unclear if the avatar task can be applied to this group, due to the long duration and sensitivity to data loss. Thus, we performed a methodological study of the avatar task, testing the feasibility of a shortened experimental paradigm.

OBJECTIVE

To investigate whether previously reported behavioural and ERP effects in the avatar task can also be seen if analysing all trials (matching/non-matching) jointly, and whether they remain robust if only a subset of the data is analysed.

METHOD

Healthy individuals (n = 20) completed the avatar task with ERP measurement. ERP components (P3, LFSW) and behavioural data were investigated by A) comparing use of only matching trials (n = 384) versus all trials (n = 768), and B) examining if reduced duration of assessment, by analysing only a subset of the data, impacts ERP findings.

RESULTS

We observed minimal differences when analysing data from only matching trial types compared to all trial types. Further, ERP amplitudes and latency findings were replicated when analysing only a subset of the data.

CONCLUSIONS

The duration of the avatar task can be reduced to avoid long testing times, thus making it better suited for use in clinical populations.

Knowledge before Belief

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations of beliefs, which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations of knowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one doesn't even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that non-human primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibit a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind-one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it.

Perspective-taking is spontaneous but not automatic

Data from a range of different experimental paradigms—in particular (but not only) the dot perspective task—have been interpreted as evidence that humans automatically track the perspective of other individuals. Results from other studies, however, have cast doubt on this interpretation, and some researchers have suggested that phenomena that seem like perspective-taking might instead be the products of simpler behavioural rules. The issue remains unsettled in significant part because different schools of thought, with different theoretical perspectives, implement the experimental tasks in subtly different ways, making direct comparisons difficult. Here, we explore the possibility that subtle differences in experimental method explain otherwise irreconcilable findings in the literature. Across five experiments we show that the classic result in the dot perspective task is not automatic (it is not purely stimulus-driven), but nor is it exclusively the product of simple behavioural rules that do not involve mentalising. Instead, participants do compute the perspectives of other individuals rapidly, unconsciously, and involuntarily, but only when attentional systems prompt them to do so (just as, for instance, the visual system puts external objects into focus only as and when required). This finding prompts us to clearly distinguish spontaneity from automaticity. Spontaneous perspective-taking may be a computationally efficient means of navigating the social world.

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

Theory of mind (ToM) is defined as the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others and is often said to be one of the cornerstones of efficient social interaction. In recent years, a number of authors have suggested that one particular ToM process occurs spontaneously in that it is rapid and outside of conscious control. This work has argued that humans efficiently compute the visual perspective of other individuals. In this article, we present a critique of this notion both on empirical and theoretical grounds. We argue that the experiments and paradigms that purportedly demonstrate spontaneous perspective-taking have not as yet convincingly demonstrated the existence of such a phenomenon. We also suggest that it is not possible to represent the percept of another person, spontaneous or otherwise. Indeed, the perspective-taking field has suggested that humans can represent the visual experience of others. That is, going beyond assuming that we can represent another's viewpoint in anything other than symbolic form. In this sense, the field suffers from the same problem that afflicted the "pictorial" theory in the mental imagery debate. In the last section we present a number of experiments designed to provide a more thorough assessment of whether humans can indeed represent the visual experience of others.