Age of avatar modulates the altercentric bias in a visual perspective-taking task: ERP and behavioral evidence

Visual perspective taking neural processing in forensic cases with high density EEG

This EEG study aims at dissecting the differences in the activation of neural generators between borderline personality disorder patients with court-ordered measures (BDL-COM) and healthy controls in visual perspective taking. We focused on the distinction between mentalizing (Avatar) and non-mentalizing (Arrow) stimuli as well as self versus other-perspective in the dot perspective task (dPT) in a sample of 15 BDL-COM cases and 54 controls, all of male gender. BDL-COM patients showed a late and diffuse right hemisphere involvement of neural generators contrasting with the occipitofrontal topography observed in controls. For Avatars only and compared to controls, the adoption of Self perspective involved a lower EEG activity in the left inferior frontal, right middle temporal cortex and insula in BDL-COM patients prior to 80 ms post-stimulus. When taking the Other-perspective, BDL-COM patients also showed a lower activation of superior frontal, right inferior temporal and fusiform cortex within the same time frame. The beta oscillation power was significantly lower in BDL-COM patients than controls between 400 and 1300 ms post stimulus in the Avatar-Other condition. These results indicate that BDL-COM patients display both altered topography of EEG activation patterns and reduced abilities to mobilize beta oscillations during the treatment of mentalistic stimuli in dPT.

Indistinguishable behavioural and neural correlates of perceptual self-other distinction in autistic and neurotypical adults

Previous research has suggested that self-bias (i.e., enhanced cognitive processing of self-versus other-relevant information) may be atypical in autism spectrum conditions (ASC), perhaps due to difficulties with self-other distinction. However, empirical evidence for this is inconsistent, and the neural basis of processing differences remains unknown. We present two experiments that aimed to test perceptual self-bias and familiarity effects in ASC using a perceptual-association task. Participants were asked to distinguish face/label associations of the self from those of other people of differing levels of familiarity (i.e., friend vs stranger). Experiment 1 took an individual differences approach by testing whether behavioural self-bias is associated with the number of autistic traits in a neurotypical adult sample (N = 59). Experiment 2 took a case-control approach by testing whether behavioural self-bias and associated ERP responses differ between neurotypical (N = 27) and autistic (N = 30) adults. Across both experiments, behavioural results showed that participants experienced a self-bias (self > friend and stranger) and a familiarity effect (e.g., friend > stranger); neither effect was affected by the number of autistic traits or autism diagnosis. In Experiment 2, analysis of N1, N2, and P3 ERP components revealed a typical self-bias in both groups (self distinct from friend and stranger), and only the autistic group showed evidence of a familiarity effect (N2 more negative-going for stranger than friend). The findings are discussed in relation to self-other distinction ability, and the relevance of other neuropsychological and psychiatric conditions such as anxiety and alexithymia are also considered.

Inhibiting responses under the watch of a recently synchronized peer increases self-monitoring: evidence from functional near-infrared spectroscopy

Developing motor synchrony with a peer (through interventions such as the mirror game) can yield collaborative, cognitive and social benefits. However, it is also well established that observation by an audience can improve cognition. The combined and relative advantages offered by motor synchronization and audience effects are not yet understood. It is important to address this gap to determine the extent to which synchronizing activities might interact with the positive effects of an audience. In this preregistered study, we investigate the extent to which response inhibition may be improved when observed by a peer after motor synchronization with this peer. We compare behavioural and cortical (functional near-infrared spectroscopy; fNIRS) measures of inhibition between synchronized and non-synchronized dyads and find that the presence of a synchronized peer-audience introduces a speed-accuracy trade-off, consisting of slower reaction times and improved accuracy. This co-occurs with cortical activation in bilateral inferior frontal and middle prefrontal cortices, which are implicated in monitoring and maintenance of social alignment. Our findings have implications for carers and support people, who may benefit from synchronizing activities for rehabilitating inhibition and social skills in clinical settings.

Recursive structures modulate the electrophysiological correlates of visual perspective taking

An increasing number of studies have focused on the neural basis of complex mental inferences, which requires an understanding of the recursive nature of thought; however, the precise electrophysiological response to a recursive structure remains unclear. The present event-related potential (ERP) study investigated the recursive structure effect on the neural correlates of visual perspective taking by modifying a third-person visual perspective-taking task. Participants were required to determine how many dots in the presented scenes could be seen from the cued perspective, including the perspectives in the self, other, and recursive (one avatar's belief of another avatar) conditions. The ERP results showed that the N100 and P200 components specific to the recursive-perspective condition showed greater attentional allocation; the N200 component increased in the recursive condition and was related to the conflict process; and larger late slow waves were found in the other- and recursive-perspective conditions compared with those in the self-perspective condition, which reflected the decoupling mechanism. The results suggested that high-order perspective taking requires more attentional resources and conflict processing for further decoupling from the self-perspective.

Shared social groups or shared experiences? The effect of shared knowledge on children's perspective-taking

Although the ability to consider others' visual perspectives to interpret ambiguous communication emerges during childhood, people sometimes fail to attend to their partner's perspective. Two studies investigated whether 4- to 6-year-olds show a "closeness-communication bias" in their consideration of a partner's perspective in a communication task. Participants played a game that required them to take their partner's visual perspective in order to interpret an ambiguous instruction. If children, like adults, perform worse when they overestimate the extent to which their perspective is aligned with that of a partner, then they should make more perspective-taking errors when interacting with a socially close partner compared with a more socially distant partner. In Study 1, social closeness was based on belonging to the same social group. In Study 2, social closeness was based on caregiving, a long-standing social relationship with a close kinship bond. Although social group membership did not affect children's consideration of their partner's perspective, children did make more perspective-taking errors when interacting with a close caregiver compared with a novel experimenter. These findings suggest that close personal relationships may be more likely to lead children to overestimate perspective alignment and hinder children's perspective-taking than shared social group membership, and they highlight important questions about the mechanisms underlying the effects of partner characteristics in perspective-taking tasks.

Manipulating avatar age and gender in level-2 visual perspective taking

Visual perspective taking (VPT) represents how the world appears from another person's position. The age, group status and emotional displays of the other person have been shown to affect task performance, but tasks often confound social and spatial outcome measures by embedding perspective taking in explicitly social contexts or theory-of-mind reasoning. Furthermore, while previous research has suggested that visual perspective taking may be impacted by avatar characteristics, it is unknown whether this is driven by general group processing or a specific deficit in mentalizing about outgroups, for example, children. Therefore, using a minimally social task (i.e., the task was not communicative, and acknowledging the "mind" of the avatar was not necessitated), we examined whether avatar age and avatar gender affect performance on simpler (low angular disparity) and more effortful, embodied (high angular disparity) perspective judgments. Ninety-two participants represented the visuospatial perspectives of a boy, girl, man, or woman who were presented at various angular disparities. A target object was placed in front of the avatar and participants responded to the orientation of the object from the avatar's position. The findings suggest that social features of visuospatial perspective taking (VSPT) are processed separately from the fundamental spatial computations. Further, Level-2 VSPT appears to be affected by general group categorization (e.g., age and gender) rather than a deficit in mentalizing about a specific outgroup (e.g., children).

Mentalizing and self-other distinction in visual perspective taking: the analysis of temporal neural processing using high-density EEG

This high density EEG report dissects the neural processing in the visual perspective taking using four experimental comparisons (Arrow, Avatar and Self, Other). Early activation differences occurred between the Avatar and the Arrow condition in primary visual pathways concomitantly with alpha and beta phase locked responses predominant in the Avatar condition. In later time points, brain activation was stronger for the Avatar condition in paracentral lobule of frontal lobe. When taking the other's perspective, there was an increased recruitment of generators in the occipital and temporal lobes and later on in mentalizing and salience networks bilaterally before spreading to right frontal lobe subdivisions. Microstate analysis further supported late recruitment of the medial frontal gyrus and precentral lobule in this condition. Other perspective for the Avatar only showed a strong beta response located first in left occipito-temporal and right parietal areas, and later on in frontal lobes. Our EEG data support distinct brain processes for the Avatar condition with an increased recruitment of brain generators that progresses from primary visual areas to the anterior brain. Taking the other's perspective needs an early recruitment of neural processors in posterior areas involved in theory of mind with later involvement of additional frontal generators.

The influence of in-groups and out-groups on the theory-of-mind processing: evidence from different ethnic college students

According to previous studies of theory of mind (ToM), social environment and cultural background affect individuals' cognitive ability to understand other people's minds. There are cross-group differences in ToM. The present study aimed to examine whether social environment and culture affect the ToM in Uygur and Han groups and whether the individual's cognitive ToM and affective ToM show in-group advantages. Han and Uygur college students were recruited as participants. The "self/other differentiation task" was used to measure cognitive ToM (Study 1), and the "Yoni task" was used to measure both cognitive and affective ToM (Study 2). We found that Han participants processed the cognitive and affective states of others faster and more accurately than Uygur ones. Uygur and Han participants processed in-group members' cognitive and affective states faster and more accurately. Furthermore, Uygur participants were more accurate in the cognitive ToM processing of in-group members, while Han participants were faster in the affective ToM processing of in-group members. The findings indicated that ethnic culture and group identify might influence ToM processing. Strengthening exchanges between ethnic groups may enable individuals to better process out-group members' psychological states.

Theory of Mind in Offending: A Systematic Review

Theory of mind (ToM) impairment is associated with poor social functioning in some psychological disorders (e.g., autism and schizophrenia). ToM deficits have also been linked with offending behavior in the theoretical literature. However, no review has examined the empirical evidence for such a link. We carried out a systematic review to provide a critical overview of studies involving ToM ability in offenders. We included studies published in English that used an instrument to measure at least one aspect of ToM. Twenty-eight eligible studies were identified and coded. Our findings reveal a generally mixed literature. Taking study quality into account, our findings suggest that offenders and nonoffenders do not differ in their first-order ToM. For second-order ToM, findings are mixed, even when only the highest quality studies are examined. Studies exploring advanced ToM showed mixed results overall, though the highest quality research appeared to indicate that offenders have impairments in advanced ToM which means that they may have difficulty understanding various mental states such as pretense, white lies, irony, double bluffs, and sarcasm. We suggest that well-controlled future studies, which also measure other facets of ToM (e.g., distinguishing between cognitive and affective ToM or examining ToM content), are needed to fully understand the role of ToM in offending.

Seeing the World From Others' Perspective: 14-Month-Olds Show Altercentric Modulation Effects by Others' Beliefs

Humans have a propensity to readily adopt others' perspective, which often influences their behavior even when it seemingly should not. This altercentric influence has been widely studied in adults, yet we lack an understanding of its ontogenetic origins. The current studies investigated whether 14-month-olds' search in a box for potential objects is modulated by another person's belief about the box's content. We varied the person's potential belief such that in her presence/absence an object was removed, added, or exchanged for another, leading to her true/false belief about the object's presence (Experiment 1, n = 96); or transformed into another object, leading to her true/false belief about the object's identity (i.e., the objects represented under a specific aspect, Experiment 2, n = 32). Infants searched longer if the other person believed that an object remained in the box, showing an altercentric influence early in development. These results suggest that infants spontaneously represent others' beliefs involving multiple objects and raise the possibility that infants can appreciate that others encode the world under a unique aspect.

Visual perspective-taking in complex natural scenes

Studies of visual perspective-taking have shown that adults can rapidly and accurately compute their own and other peoples’ viewpoints, but they experience difficulties when the two perspectives are inconsistent. We tested whether these egocentric (i.e., interference from one’s own perspective) and altercentric biases (i.e., interference from another person’s perspective) persist in ecologically valid complex environments. Participants (N = 150) completed a dot-probe visual perspective-taking task, in which they verified the number of discs in natural scenes containing real people, first only according to their own perspective and then judging both their own and another person’s perspective. Results showed that the other person’s perspective did not disrupt self perspective-taking judgements when the other perspective was not explicitly prompted. In contrast, egocentric and altercentric biases were found when participants were prompted to switch between self and other perspectives. These findings suggest that altercentric visual perspective-taking can be activated spontaneously in complex real-world contexts, but is subject to both top-down and bottom-up influences, including explicit prompts or salient visual stimuli.

Tracking developmental differences in real-world social attention across adolescence, young adulthood and older adulthood

Detecting and responding appropriately to social information in one's environment is a vital part of everyday social interactions. Here, we report two preregistered experiments that examine how social attention develops across the lifespan, comparing adolescents (10-19 years old), young (20-40 years old) and older (60-80 years old) adults. In two real-world tasks, participants were immersed in different social interaction situations-a face-to-face conversation and navigating an environment-and their attention to social and non-social content was recorded using eye-tracking glasses. The results revealed that, compared with young adults, adolescents and older adults attended less to social information (that is, the face) during face-to-face conversation, and to people when navigating the real world. Thus, we provide evidence that real-world social attention undergoes age-related change, and these developmental differences might be a key mechanism that influences theory of mind among adolescents and older adults, with potential implications for predicting successful social interactions in daily life.

Avatars with faces of real people: A construction method for scientific experiments in virtual reality

Experimental psychology research typically employs methods that greatly simplify the real-world conditions within which cognition occurs. This approach has been successful for isolating cognitive processes, but cannot adequately capture how perception operates in complex environments. In turn, real-world environments rarely afford the access and control required for rigorous scientific experimentation. In recent years, technology has advanced to provide a solution to these problems, through the development of affordable high-capability virtual reality (VR) equipment. The application of VR is now increasing rapidly in psychology, but the realism of its avatars, and the extent to which they visually represent real people, is captured poorly in current VR experiments. Here, we demonstrate a user-friendly method for creating photo-realistic avatars of real people and provide a series of studies to demonstrate their psychological characteristics. We show that avatar faces of familiar people are recognised with high accuracy (Study 1), replicate the familiarity advantage typically observed in real-world face matching (Study 2), and show that these avatars produce a similarity-space that corresponds closely with real photographs of the same faces (Study 3). These studies open the way to conducting psychological experiments on visual perception and social cognition with increased realism in VR.

The presence of other-race people disrupts spontaneous level-2 visual perspective taking

Visual perspective taking is an essential skill for effective social interaction. Previous studies have tested various perceiver-based factors that affect intentional perspective taking; however, the factors affecting spontaneous perspective taking remain unknown. To fill this gap, the present study used a novel spontaneous visual perspective taking paradigm to explore how an agent's race and emotion affect spontaneous level-2 visual perspective taking. In Experiment 1, the participants completed a mental rotation task while a human agent simultaneously gazed at the target with positive, negative, or neutral facial expressions. The agent was African, Caucasian, or Chinese. The results revealed that the other-race agents disrupted the participants' spontaneous level-2 visual perspective taking, while emotion weakly affected it. Experiment 2 retested whether emotion could affect spontaneous level-2 visual perspective taking while only own-race agents were used. The participants completed the same task as that in Experiment 1. The results revealed that emotions weakly affected spontaneous level-2 visual perspective taking. In summary, the present study first examined what target-based factors affect spontaneous level-2 visual perspective taking. The results extend the representation and incorporation of the close others' responses (RICOR) model. Specifically, people routinely construct representations of other people's points of view when they share the same racial group.

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.

Taking the perspectives of many people: Humanization matters

In a busy space, people encounter many other people with different viewpoints, but classic studies of perspective-taking examine only one agent at a time. This paper explores the issue of selectivity in visual perspective-taking (VPT) when different people are available to interact with. We consider the hypothesis that humanization impacts on VPT in four studies using virtual reality methods. Experiments 1 and 2 use the director task to show that for more humanized agents (an in-group member or a virtual human agent), participants were more likely to use VPT to achieve lower error rate. Experiments 3 and 4 used a two-agent social mental rotation task to show that participants are faster and more accurate to recognize items which are oriented towards a more humanized agent (an in-group member or a naturally moving agent). All results support the claim that humanization alters the propensity to engage in VPT in rich social contexts.

Altercentric Cognition: How Others Influence Our Cognitive Processing

Humans are ultrasocial, yet, theories of cognition have often been occupied with the solitary mind. Over the past decade, an increasing volume of work has revealed how individual cognition is influenced by the presence of others. Not only do we rapidly identify others in our environment, but we also align our attention with their attention, which influences what we perceive, represent, and remember, even when our immediate goals do not involve coordination. Here, we refer to the human sensitivity to others and to the targets and content of their attention as 'altercentrism'; and aim to bring seemingly disparate findings together, suggesting that they are all reflections of the altercentric nature of human cognition.