Visuo-spatial perspective taking (VSPT) explained

Visuo-spatial perspective taking (VSPT) tasks require participants to accurately adopt another person’s perspective – usually via an avatar on computer-based tasks. Level 1 VSPT may be described as the ability to adopt another’s visual viewpoint, and understand the spatial arrangement of objects from another person’s perspective. For example, a young infant aged 3-4 years old, who may lack sophisticated cognitive resources, may be able to understand the visual arrangements of objects from another person’s perspective and give basic information about what the other person may be able to see, all done without reference to their own perspective (Flavell, Everett, Croft & Flavell, 1981). So, an infant sitting opposite an adult may correctly state that a toy between them is showing its other side to the adult. Another example in adult participants is when a dot probe briefly appears either side of an avatar and the participant is asked to make a basic decision about whether the dot appeared to the left or right of the avatar. When a dot appears above/below an avatar this is considered a perspective which is congruent to the viewer’s own, that is because there is no conflict in perspective. What is above or below the avatar is the same for the viewer. However when a dot appears to the left or right of an avatar the brain automatically takes on both the visual perspective of the avatar and the perspective of the object in relation to its own position. In a study by Quereshi et al., (2010) participants accommodate the irrelevant viewpoint of an avatar even though they are instructed to ignore it, demonstrating that the brain automatically and effortlessly adopts perspectives of others even when we do not need to. The question remains: why? It could be argued that understanding

the world from another’s perspective, even though irrelevant, is necessary for our own protection, or that simply this Level 1 perspective selection is undertaken because knowing what another sees facilitates our own social comprehension. Ultimately we do not know why we do this, or the meaning behind it, at this point in the research process what is known is that we automatically processes others viewpoints and that this is of social relevance.

It should be noted that VSPT is divided into two levels and Level 2 VSPT describes the additional process whereby one has the ability to see and state what another can see even though the others viewpoint may be entirely different to their own. Here, for example, the child needs to think logically about what the experimenter can see by evaluating the scene in front of them. This is a more cognitively effortful task.

There is a lack of agreement within the literature as to how VSPT is triggered. Some suggest that perspective taking is triggered by the mere representation of another human, as in objects which represent a human or more specifically, the presence of another mind (Abell, Happe, & Frith, 2000; Zwickel, 2009). Research such as Abell et al. (2000) and Zwickel (2009) infers that VSPT can be triggered in one person (the observer) by another person or object, as long as the conditions for agent representation are met. This would suggest that objects do not have to be human (triangles moving in human like ways have triggered VSPT; Zwickel, 2009) to trigger VSPT and it would also suggest that stimulus can be neutral– the significance of which is discussed more throughout this thesis. Contradicting this idea however is one study by Tversky and Hard (2009), their study shows that the presence of an agent or ‘mind’ was not enough to trigger VSPT and that more is needed. Their results suggest that a human action, such as reaching for an object, was also required (as also shown by Mazzarella et al., 2012).

To further explore the conditions under which VSPT is triggered Zwickel and Müller (2010) examined the possibility that VSPT could be triggered by emotion (namely fear). Indeed their results suggest that action in the sense of bodily movement is not required to trigger VSPT and that emotion (fear), which in itself could be considered an action, can also trigger

VSPT. Moreover their results suggest the presence of another mind is also not sufficient to trigger VSPT (neutral faces failed to trigger perspective taking), and that, VSPT is triggered by ‘relevance’ such as the emotion fear. What all this evidence seems to suggest is that we adopt another’s visual viewpoint automatically – cognitively effortlessly – but that this effect is more robust when the stimuli around us are particularly salient (such as an action or an emotion).

3.2.2 VSPT and perceived emotion

Zwickel and Müller (2010) have shown that VSPT happens spontaneously in computer based tasks when the stimuli are particularly salient. In their task participants respond, reacting as quickly as possible, by pressing a selected key on a computer keyboard which corresponds to a dot probe which is shown for 500ms to the left or right of a fearful or neutral face (incongruent task), or above or below the neutral and fearful faces (congruent condition). Zwickel and Müller (2010) state that a slower reaction to the dot probe within the facial stimuli conditions is indicative of spontaneous VSPT, and that this would be more pronounced when the perspective differed from their own – incongruent condition – comparable to the congruent condition. Their results showed a reaction time (RT) cost only when the perspective of the face differed from their own, i.e., they were slower to respond to dot probe in these trials, and this RT cost was more pronounced when the face conveyed a fearful expression. The authors suggest that this RT cost to fearful faces demonstrates that the relevance of the face increases the likelihood of spontaneous VSPT and that because there was no RT cost between the neutral face and the baseline condition we cannot conclude that the facial stimuli itself was relevant enough to arouse VSPT.