Social models influence visual perspective taking in memory

ABSTRACT

The ability to take others’ perspectives is crucial for social functioning, giving insight into the viewpoints of those around us. Under certain circumstances, we take others’ perspectives spontaneously, referring to an event from another’s perspective in the absence of explicit prompting. Here, we explored whether this also happens after a delay, with implications for memory. In Experiment 1, we closely replicated a finding that participants are more likely to take an altercentric (“other”) perspective with a person present but an egocentric (“self”) perspective with no person present. In Experiment 2, we extended these findings to examine what happens with a delay. Here, we provided novel evidence that the mere presence of a person in a still picture can alter memory for the spatial layout of a scene. These results suggest that people spontaneously influence both in-the-moment perceptions and memory for events, with implications for theory and applied settings.

KEYWORDS:

• perspective taking
• social cognition
• spatial cognition
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).