Centre for Behavioural Science and Applied Psychology, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK.
School of Psychological Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2023 Mar;76(3):469-484. doi: 10.1177/17470218221094310. Epub 2022 Jun 2.
People's attention cannot help being affected by what others are looking at. The dot-perspective task has been often employed to investigate this visual attentional shift. In this task, participants are presented with virtual scenes with a cue facing some targets and must judge how many targets are visible from their own or the cue perspective. Typically, this task shows an interference pattern: Participants record slower reaction times (RTs) and more errors when the cue is facing away from the targets. Interestingly, this occurs also when participants take their own perspective. Two accounts contend the explanation of this interference. The mentalising account focuses on the social relevance of the cue, while the domain-general account focuses on the directional features of the cue. To investigate the relative contribution of the two accounts, we developed a Social_Only cue, a cue having only social features and compared its effects with a Social+Directional cue, which had both social and directional features. Results show that while the Social+Directional cue generates the typical interference pattern, the Social_Only cue does not generate interference in the RTs, only in the error rate. We advance an integration between the mentalising and the domain-general accounts. We suggest that the dot-perspective task requires two processes: an orienting process, elicited by the directional features of the cue and measured by the RTs, and a decisional process elicited by the social features of the cue and measured also by the error rate.
人们的注意力不可避免地会受到他人所关注的事物的影响。点视角任务常被用于研究这种视觉注意力的转移。在这个任务中，参与者被呈现出带有提示的虚拟场景，这些提示面向一些目标，参与者必须判断从自己或提示的视角可以看到多少个目标。通常情况下，这个任务会出现一种干扰模式：当提示面向目标的相反方向时，参与者的反应时间（RT）会变慢，错误率会增加。有趣的是，当参与者从自己的视角出发时，也会出现这种情况。有两种解释可以说明这种干扰。心理化解释侧重于提示的社会相关性，而领域一般性解释则侧重于提示的方向特征。为了探究这两种解释的相对贡献，我们开发了一种仅具有社会特征的 Social_Only 提示，并将其与具有社会和方向特征的 Social+Directional 提示进行了比较。结果表明，虽然 Social+Directional 提示会产生典型的干扰模式，但 Social_Only 提示不会在 RT 中产生干扰，只会在错误率中产生干扰。我们提出了一种心理化和领域一般性解释之间的整合。我们认为，点视角任务需要两个过程：一个是由提示的方向特征引发的定向过程，由 RT 测量；另一个是由提示的社会特征引发的决策过程，也由错误率测量。
