Saetta Gianluca, Brugger Peter, Schrohe Hannah, Lenggenhager Bigna
Neuropsychology, Department of Neurology, University Hospital Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Neuropsychology Unit, Valens Rehabilitation Centre, Valens, Switzerland.
Front Psychol. 2019 Jun 14;10:1338. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01338. eCollection 2019.
Previous studies suggest that visual encoding of ethnicity of in-group/out-group members might influence empathy and sensorimotor sharing. Here, we investigated whether mental perspective taking, presumably a precursor of empathy, is also influenced by in-group/out-group perception and the implicit attitudes toward it. We used an embodied egocentric visual-perspective taking task, the full body rotation task (FBR), in which participants were asked to mentally rotate themselves into the position of dark- or light-skinned bodies. FBR was contrasted to a pure sensorimotor task, the hand laterality task (HLT), in which participants were asked to mentally rotate their hand to the posture of seen light- or dark-skinned hands, which does not require mental simulation of another person's perspective. We expected the FBR but not the HLT to be influenced by the skin color of the stimuli and by the individual implicit biases toward out-group members. Contrary to this hypothesis, we found that neither skin color nor implicit biases modulated reaction times (RTs) in either task. The data thus suggest that unlike other empathy tasks, skin color does not influence visuospatial perspective taking.
以往的研究表明，对群体内/群体外成员种族的视觉编码可能会影响同理心和感觉运动共享。在此，我们研究了心理换位思考（推测为同理心的一个先兆）是否也会受到群体内/群体外认知以及对此的内隐态度的影响。我们使用了一个体现自我中心视觉换位思考的任务，即全身旋转任务（FBR），在该任务中，参与者被要求在脑海中将自己旋转到深色或浅色皮肤身体的位置。FBR与一个纯粹的感觉运动任务，即手偏好任务（HLT）进行对比，在HLT中，参与者被要求在脑海中将自己的手旋转到所看到的深色或浅色皮肤手的姿势，这不需要对他人视角进行心理模拟。我们预期FBR会受到刺激的肤色以及个体对群体外成员的内隐偏见的影响，而HLT则不会。与这一假设相反，我们发现肤色和内隐偏见在这两个任务中均未调节反应时间（RTs）。因此，数据表明，与其他同理心任务不同，肤色不会影响视觉空间换位思考。
