"What is my avatar seeing?": The coordination of "out-of-body" and "embodied" perspectives for scene recognition across views

Abstract

Scene recognition across a perspective change typically exhibits viewpoint dependence. Accordingly, the more the orientation of the test viewpoint departs from that of the study viewpoint, the more time its takes and the less accurate observers are to recognize the spatial layout. Three experiments show that observers can take advantage of a virtual avatar that specifies their future “embodied” perspective on the visual scene. This “out-of-body” priming reduces or even abolishes viewpoint dependence for detecting a change in an object location when the environment is respectively unknown or familiar to the observer. Viewpoint dependence occurs when both the priming and primed viewpoints do not match. Changes to permanent extended structures (such as walls) or altered object-to-object spatial relations across viewpoint change are detrimental to viewpoint priming. A neurocognitive model describes the coordination of “out-of-body” and “embodied” perspectives relevant to social perception when understanding what another individual sees.