School of Psychology, Keynes College, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7NP, UK.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2018 Dec;18(6):1298-1319. doi: 10.3758/s13415-018-0641-1.
Despite being able to rapidly and accurately infer their own and other peoples' visual perspectives, healthy adults experience difficulty ignoring the irrelevant perspective when the two perspectives are in conflict; they experience egocentric and altercentric interference. We examine for the first time how the age of an observed person (adult vs. child avatar) influences adults' visual perspective-taking, particularly the degree to which they experience interference from their own or the other person's perspective. Participants completed the avatar visual perspective-taking task, in which they verified the number of discs in a visual scene according to either their own or an on-screen avatar's perspective (Experiments 1 and 2) or only from their own perspective (Experiment 3), where the two perspectives could be consistent or in conflict. Age of avatar was manipulated between (Experiment 1) or within (Experiments 2 and 3) participants, and interference was assessed using behavioral (Experiments 1-3) and ERP (Experiment 1) measures. Results revealed that altercentric interference is reduced or eliminated when a child avatar was present, suggesting that adults do not automatically compute a child avatar's perspective. We attribute this pattern to either enhanced visual processing for own-age others or an inference on reduced mental awareness in younger children. The findings argue against a purely attentional basis for the altercentric effect, and instead support an account where both mentalising and directional processes modulate automatic visual perspective-taking, and perspective-taking effects are strongly influenced by experimental context.
尽管健康成年人能够快速准确地推断出自己和他人的视觉角度，但当两种视角发生冲突时，他们很难忽略不相关的视角；他们会经历自我中心和他人中心的干扰。我们首次研究了被观察对象的年龄（成人与儿童化身）如何影响成年人的视觉视角选择，特别是他们经历自身或他人视角干扰的程度。参与者完成了化身视觉视角选择任务，根据自己或屏幕上化身的视角（实验 1 和 2）或仅根据自己的视角（实验 3）验证视觉场景中的圆盘数量，其中两种视角可以一致或冲突。在参与者之间（实验 1）或在参与者内部（实验 2 和 3）操纵化身的年龄，并使用行为（实验 1-3）和 ERP（实验 1）测量来评估干扰。结果表明，当存在儿童化身时，他人中心的干扰会减少或消除，这表明成年人不会自动计算儿童化身的视角。我们将这种模式归因于对同年龄他人的增强的视觉处理或对年幼儿童的心理意识降低的推断。这些发现反对了他人中心效应纯粹基于注意力的观点，而是支持了一种解释，即心理化和方向过程调节自动视觉视角选择，并且视角选择效应强烈受到实验背景的影响。
