Mental State Ascriptions in Various Emotional and Social Contexts

Visual perspective taking (VPT) provides people with direct insights into how the environment looks from another’s point of view. Here, I will review evidence for a recent series of studies that VPT can be understood as a (quasi-)perceptual phenomenon, in which another’s perspective “stands in” for own sensory input and drive perceptual decision making. Using a variant of the mental rotation task, these studies show that participants can recognize items oriented away from themselves more rapidly when these items appear in a more canonical orientation to an incidentally presented another person (and slower when oriented even further away from them). These effects are of large effect size and observed even when the other person is completely passive and task-irrelevant. They therefore show that people spontaneously derive the content of another’s perspective in a form that can drive perceptual processing like one’s sensory input. They are affected by several social and non-social factors, such as whether participants explicitly take the other’s perspective or do so spontaneously, whether the other person attends to the same object as oneself , or whether one is in the presence of another human or an object to which various levels of mental states can be ascribed (e.g. robots, inanimate objects). Together, these findings argue for a framework in which perceptual anticipations of another’s perspective underlie social cognition, helping us to understand not only how other’s view the world, but also letting us vicariously explore how they would respond to it.

Over the last ten years, a significant amount of research attention has been given to the question of whether perspective-taking occurs automatically and/ or spontaneously. In our work, we've been particularly interested in level-2 perspective-taking - the ability to understand how other people see something. We have presented evidence against this process occurring automatically. Conversely, in a cooperative context, we have shown that people do take others' level-2 perspectives spontaneously. In this series of studies, we try to identify the factors that are necessary for this to occur. I will present studies looking at how spontaneous perspective-taking is impacted by: (I) Cooperative vs. competitive contexts, (ii) Individual differences in social communication and (iii) Completing dual tasks taxing executive function. We suggest that arguments over the automaticity/ spontaneity of perspective-taking have neglected the context in which perspective-taking judgements are made and the nature of the individuals who make them.

The present research aims at establishing a differentiated picture with regard to processes elicited in the empathizing individual when feeling with targets in need and with regard to empathy-induced prosocial behavior. To that effect, the role of empathized emotions is scrutinized in this context. Regarding processes elicited in the empathizing individual, one study focused on parasympathetic activity in the context of empathizing with others and yielded that inducing empathy with target persons in need results - irrespective of their emotional reaction - in increases of vagally mediated heart rate variability, which represents parasympathetic activity associated with social bonding and engagement. However, when scrutinizing sympathetic activity, findings from another experiment suggest that empathizing with a sad (versus an angry) target results in sympathetic activity consistent with relative challenge - an energy-mobilizing state associated with relatively high resources. Hence, although empathy in general prepares for social bonding and engagement as to parasympathetic activity, the emotional reaction of a target in need actually determines sympathetic activity in the empathizing individual. Beyond that, two further studies tested whether empathy-induced prosocial behavior is also impacted by the emotional reaction of the target in need. Results of two experiments suggest that empathizing with a sad (but not an angry or disgusted) target in need increases helping behavior, because only then empathic concern, based on perceptions of target neediness, is increased. Overall, the present research contributes to an ongoing debate regarding the underlying processes and the affective-motivational outcomes of empathy.

Perspective-taking, including social attention, plays a crucial role in everyday life, allowing successful interactions to occur. In this talk, we will present data examining how capacities such as social attention may change across adulthood, in a large sample of participants aged 20-90 years old. Two groups of participants were recruited; one group completed a lab-based referential-communication task (the ‘Director Task’), with behavioural and eye-tracking measures. Results revealed a quadratic fit of age in egocentric errors; performance on the task improved between 20 and 40 years old, but showed substantial decline from 40 years onwards. A similar pattern was seen in eye-tracking outcomes, which demonstrated that advancing age led to a decrease in target-bias; i.e., older adults were more distracted by a hidden competitor object, and were therefore delayed in orienting attention to the correct (mutually available) target object. A second group of participants completed two tasks – an interview-style conversation with an experimenter, and a navigation task (following a map during a short walk outside the lab) – whilst wearing mobile eye-tracking glasses, to provide a more ‘real-world’ measure of social attention. Using these real-world methodologies, results showed that across both tasks, advancing age significantly reduced the amount of time spent fixating on people, with more time spent looking at background features. The results of these studies indicate that advancing age can lead to less efficient social attention engagement, demonstrated in both lab-based and real-world task contexts.

It has been hypothesized that visual perspective-taking, a basic "Theory of Mind" mechanism, might operate quite automatically particularly in terms of "what" someone else sees. As such we were interested in whether the social category ethnicity can influence this mental state ascription mechanism. We tested this assumption by investigating the Samson level-1 visual perspective-taking paradigm using agents with different ethnic appearances (i.e., German, Turkish, Asian and African) in a German context. Participants were asked to make visual perspective judgments from their own perspective (self-judgment) as well as from the perspective of a prototypical ethnic agent (other-judgment). The respective related interference effects – altercentric and egocentric interferences - were measured. In Study 1 – where we altered Turkish and German ethnicities – we found expected in-group preferences and out-group aversions for egocentric interferences. However, this was only the case for German, but not Turkish participants. For altercentric interferences no group effects were found. In Study 2 - where we altered Asian and German agent ethnicities we found no group effects – neither for egocentric nor for altercentric interferences. In Study 3 – we altered African and German agent ethnicities. All data will be discussed in terms of a perceptual versus social judgement bias and the automaticity claims for the Samson level-1 visual perspective-taking paradigm.

In order to understand how a scene appears from an alternative point of view (Level 2 perspective-taking) adults usually engage an embodied process by which we integrate our motor representations with the imagined perspective, essentially imagining our physical selves in a new location relative to the scene. An interesting question that follows concerns the consequences of this process for our sense of where we actually are. How can we be in two places at once? In this talk, I will present the results of research showing that when we take another visual perspective we sometimes erroneously perform manual actions consistent with that perspective rather than our own. If we are instructed to act according to an imagined perspective instead, we make more accurate responses from that perspective than our own, effectively 'reversing' egocentricity. Additionally, we find no evidence that embodied perspective-taking is disrupted by real physical barriers between the participant and the desired perspective location, suggesting participants represent themselves and the scene in imaginary rather than real space. The ramifications for our understanding of embodied perspective-taking and egocentricity more broadly are discussed.