School of Education, Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, USA ; Center for Talented Youth, Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, USA ; Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, USA.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2013 Sep 5;7:497. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00497. eCollection 2013.
A striking relationship between visual spatial perspective taking (VSPT) and social skills has been demonstrated for perspective-taking tasks in which the target of the imagined or inferred perspective is a potential agent, suggesting that the presence of a potential agent may create a social context for the seemingly spatial task of imagining a novel visual perspective. In a series of studies, we set out to investigate how and when a target might be viewed as sufficiently agent-like to incur a social influence on VSPT performance. By varying the perceptual and conceptual features that defined the targets as potential agents, we find that even something as simple as suggesting animacy for a simple wooden block may be sufficient. More critically, we found that experience with one potential agent influenced the performance with subsequent targets, either by inducing or eliminating the influence of social skills on VSPT performance. These carryover effects suggest that the relationship between social skills and VSPT performance is mediated by a complex relationship that includes the task, the target, and the context in which that target is perceived. These findings highlight potential problems that arise when identifying a task as belonging exclusively to a single cognitive domain and stress instead the highly interactive nature of cognitive domains and their susceptibility to cross-domain individual differences.
已经证明，在需要想象或推断的视角的目标是潜在代理人的视角-taking 任务中，视觉空间视角-taking（VSPT）和社交技能之间存在显著关系，这表明潜在代理人的存在可能为想象新颖视觉视角的看似空间任务创造一个社交环境。在一系列研究中，我们着手研究目标如何以及何时可能被视为足够像代理人，从而对 VSPT 表现产生社交影响。通过改变定义目标为潜在代理人的感知和概念特征，我们发现，即使是像简单的木制积木那样暗示能动性的东西也可能足够了。更重要的是，我们发现，对一个潜在代理人的经验会影响随后的目标的表现，无论是通过诱导还是消除社交技能对 VSPT 表现的影响。这些转移效应表明，社会技能和 VSPT 表现之间的关系是由一个复杂的关系所介导的，其中包括任务、目标以及感知该目标的上下文。这些发现突出了在将任务识别为仅属于单一认知领域时可能出现的潜在问题，并强调了认知领域的高度交互性质及其对跨领域个体差异的敏感性。
