Signatures of cognitive difficulty in perspective-taking: is the egocentric perspective always the easiest to adopt?

ABSTRACT

In a series of experiments we examined factors that contribute to the difficulty of spatial perspective-taking and influence perspective selection. Listeners received instructions to select an object from a speaker whose depicted position varied (Experiments 1, 2, 2B). Responding from the speaker’s perspective was slower than responding egocentrically, and was slower at large oblique offsets (135°, 225°) than at the maximum offset (180°). Experiment 2B confirmed that this was not due to the number of objects in configurations. Experiment 3 suggested that the ease of adopting the imagined egocentric perspective depended on its alignment with the sensorimotor perspective. Still, perspective preference was not influenced by the documented cost of adopting perspectives, but rather by social attributions (e.g. believing that the partner was the experimenter, Exp 1, vs. another participant, Exp 2, 2B, 3). These findings have implications for understanding behaviour in contexts where interlocutors interact remotely while adopting disembodied perspectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Perspective-taking
• audience design
• mental rotation
• spatial cognition
• eye-tracking

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Artemis Stefani for assistance with data collection and data processing, and to Edwin Dalmaijer for assistance with the eye-tracking analyses. We are also thankful to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Alexia Galati http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7593-6629

Notes

1. Two trials were removed from the analyses of both Experiments because the participants’ responses were coded incorrectly in E-Prime due to experimenter error. Both trials had the figure representing the speaker be at 90° and involved a back instruction; one was a control trial and the other was an ambiguous trial.

2. We did not enter the number of objects as a fixed effect in the models, as it was confounded with offset type; including this factor would have introduced collinearity, since trials with the speaker at orthogonal offsets always involved 2-objects and trials with the speaker at oblique offsets always involved 3-objects. We address this issue in Experiment 2B.

3. We also analysed fixation dwell times to egocentric and other-centric response options prior to responding. As the results for all experiments converge with those for the first fixation, we omit those analyses for the sake of brevity.

4. To corroborate this point, in a supplementary analysis, we examined the sawtooth pattern of performance, observed in Figure 3, in an ANOVA framework by fitting the participants’ aggregated response times at each of the five headings (90°, 135°, 180°, 225°, 270°) with a planned contrast with the following weights: −0.5, 0.75, −0.5, 0.75, −0.5, with maxima at 135° and 225° (for a related analytical approach, see Galati et al., 2013; Greenauer & Waller, 2008). This sawtooth contrast described adequately the listeners’ response times in both experiments. For Experiment 1, the planned contrast was significant, F (1, 25) = 8.18, p < .05, accounting for 98% of the variance, and leaving a non-significant amount of the variance unaccounted for (p = .97). For Experiment 2, this planned contrast was also significant, F (1, 25) = 5.48, p < .05, accounting for 91% of the variance, and leaving a non-significant amount of the variance unaccounted for (p = .89). This sawtooth pattern was more pronounced in Experiment 2 (as seen Figure 3), qualifying the interaction between the speaker's position and the Experiment, F (4, 200) = 4.69, p < .01.

5. To gauge the degree to which the social attribution promoted by the cover story was successful, before debriefing, we had asked participants a series of questions about their beliefs about their task partner. These questions began with a broad framing (“Did you notice anything strange in the experiment?”), asked about their awareness of their perspective strategy and its consistency, and in Experiments 2, 2b, and 3 – in which we had used the cover story about the confederate being another participant – we asked explicitly about their beliefs about their task partner (“Did you think at any point that the person providing instructions next door may not have been a real participant?”). In these experiments, 44% of participants responded “Yes” to that question – i.e. reporting that they suspected at least at some point that their partner was not a real participant.

Although this percentage may seem high, its interpretation is complicated by the issue of demand characteristics. Given the questions posed by the Experimenter leading up to the debriefing, it's unclear whether all participants who responded “Yes” actually suspected the task partner to be a confederate during the experiment, or whether instead they felt compelled to respond so because the possibility just occurred to them and they wanted to save face. Notably, participants rarely reported their suspicions about the use of a confederate in the preceding questions. Moreover, participants’ response to this target question was not associated with their perspective-taking strategy; participants were not more likely to respond egocentrically if they had responded “Yes” (i.e. considering the confederate's informational needs as minimal). This could be either due unreliable responses to that question driven by demand characteristics, or due to participants behaving collaboratively – despite any suspicions – according to the information they were provided in the cover story. Even if not all participants bought the cover story we provided, remarkably, any suspicions about the confederate were not enough to trump the effect of the cover story, as evidenced by the increased other-centric orientation observed in Experiment 2 relative to Experiment 1.

6. The only procedural difference relative to Experiment 2 was that, during the experiment, E1 was in a room down the hall (vs. an adjacent room) and E2 remained in the same room as the participant, but in another cubicle and not visible to the participant. These changes in the set up could not be avoided, as the UCY Psychology Department had moved to a new building.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions grant agreement No 705037 to A.G. and by the European Research Council under grant number 206912-OSSMA to M.A.