Mentalizing Another's Visual World-A Novel Exploration via Motion Aftereffect

Adopting the visual perspective of a group member is influenced by implicit group averaging

As social entities, individuals' perception and behaviors are susceptible to the influence of their social groups. Previous research has consistently shown that the group context in which individuals are situated significantly influences their perceptual processing. We aim to investigate whether the group context in which another individual is situated alters our understanding of their visual perception, which holds profound implications for interpersonal interactions. To address this inquiry, we conducted three experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a visual scene depicting multiple avatars seated around a table, all facing an arrow positioned at the center of the table. They were instructed to adopt the visual perspective of a specific avatar within the group to perceive the arrow's orientation, and then reproduce its orientation from their own perspectives. We found that participants exhibited a bias towards the group's average perspective when reproducing the arrow's orientation. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that reinforced group processing could elicit an earlier appearance of this bias. In Experiment 3, we investigated an alternative explanation positing that the aforementioned bias originated from visual ensemble perception rather than group influence by instructing participants to reproduce the target avatar's position relative to the arrow's orientation. If the bias indeed originated from ensemble perception, it should also manifest in this task. However, the absence of any reproduction bias refuted this possibility. Through these experiments, we demonstrate that our understanding of an individual's perceptual experiences is influenced by the social context in which they are situated, which manifests as a convergence phenomenon.

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.