Inclined to see it your way: Do altercentric intrusion effects in visual perspective taking reflect an intrinsically social process?

Abstract

It has been suggested that some aspects of mental state understanding recruit a rudimentary, but fast and efficient, processing system, demonstrated by the obligatory slowing down of judgements about what the self can see when this is incongruent with what another can see. We tested the social nature of this system by investigating to what extent these altercentric intrusions are elicited under conditions that differed in their social relevance and, further, how these related to self-reported social perspective taking and empathy. In Experiment 1, adult participants were asked to make “self” or “other” perspective-taking judgements during congruent (“self” and “other” can see the same items) or incongruent conditions (“self” and “other” cannot see the same items) in conditions that were social (i.e., involving a social agent), semisocial (an arrow), or nonsocial (a dual-coloured block). Reaction time indices of altercentric intrusion effects were present across all conditions, but were significantly stronger for the social than for the less social conditions. Self-reported perspective taking and empathy correlated with altercentric intrusion effects in the social condition only. In Experiment 2, the significant correlations for the social condition were replicated, but this time with gaze duration indices of altercentric intrusion effects. Findings are discussed with regard to the degree to which this rudimentary system is socially specialized and how it is linked to more conceptual understanding.

Keywords:

• Visual perspective taking
• Automatic
• Individual differences
• Altercentric intrusion effects
• Theory of mind

Notes

¹For ease of explication, throughout this manuscript we use the term “altercentric” to refer to both biologically relevant (avatar) and biologically irrelevant (arrows, dual-coloured blocks) cues.

²The same patterns of results were obtained irrespective of whether consistent mismatching trials or both consistent and inconsistent mismatching trials were removed from the analyses. See Samson et al. (2010, p. 1257) for a discussion on the unbalanced way mismatching trials have to be constructed and concomitant dangers around the artificial inflation of consistency effects.

³This was still the case when using age and sex as covariates, F(2105) = 8.90, p < .001.

⁴Spearman's correlations were also carried out as the range of mean RTs across tasks (“self” trials: social 925.7 ms; semisocial 1032.5 ms; nonsocial 814 ms) might have affected our results. These revealed a significant positive association between altercentric intrusion and Empathic Concern, r = .44, p = .005, and an association approaching significance between altercentric intrusion and Perspective Taking, r = .28, p = .06.