Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2019 Jul;47(5):1031-1043. doi: 10.3758/s13421-019-00910-y.
Including an avatar in the array in a spatial perspective-taking test improves performance, but it is not clear why. Different aspects of an avatar, including its directional nature, its agency (perceived ability for action), and its interactivity, may all influence perspective-taking performance. Experiment 1 examined how performance was influenced by a social directional cue (an avatar) and an abstract directional cue (an arrow). Participants performed best in the avatar condition and no better in the arrow condition than in a control condition. These results suggest that directionality of the cue alone is not sufficient to facilitate performance on this task. Experiment 2 compared an avatar to a concrete directional cue that was grounded in everyday experience interacting with objects, but was non-agentive (a chair). There was no significant difference between the avatar and the chair conditions, which both outperformed the control condition. Participants in both experiments and all conditions primarily reported utilizing mental simulation strategies that involved imagining themselves in the array of objects. The results suggest that grounding the task in everyday interactions with people or objects facilitates this mental simulation process and more generally enhances performance on perspective-taking tasks.
在空间视角-taking 测试中，在数组中包含一个化身可以提高表现，但不清楚原因。化身的不同方面，包括其方向性、其能动性（感知到的行动能力）和交互性，都可能影响视角-taking 表现。实验 1 检验了社交方向提示（化身）和抽象方向提示（箭头）如何影响表现。参与者在化身条件下表现最好，而在箭头条件下并不比控制条件下更好。这些结果表明，仅提示的方向性不足以促进这项任务的表现。实验 2 将化身与具体的方向提示进行了比较，该提示源于与物体交互的日常经验，但不具有能动性（椅子）。化身条件和椅子条件之间没有显著差异，这两种条件都优于控制条件。两个实验中的参与者和所有条件下的参与者主要报告使用了涉及想象自己处于物体数组中的心理模拟策略。结果表明，将任务扎根于与人和物体的日常交互中，可以促进这种心理模拟过程，并更普遍地增强视角-taking 任务的表现。
