School of Psychology, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China.
Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, 300074, China.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2024 May;86(4):1176-1185. doi: 10.3758/s13414-023-02772-8. Epub 2023 Sep 8.
It has been argued that humans can employ mentalizing implicitly and automatically, even with others' visual experiences. In terms of visual perspective-taking (i.e., inferring another's visual experience), the Dot Perspective Task has been considered to provide evidence for this hypothesis. People were found to respond slower when their visual experience was inconsistent with others' (referred to as the consistency effect). However, the specific underlying cognitive process of the consistency effect has been a topic of intense debate, i.e., whether the consistency effect represents a process of social cognition such as mentalizing. Here, we introduce a modified version of the Dot Perspective Task, in which all the targets appear at the position where the avatar is gazing, while some of the targets are invisible to the avatar due to a barrier that may block the avatar's line of sight. Therefore, the effect of perspective-taking and attention-cueing can be better disassociated in the modified paradigm. The results of Experiment 1 illustrated a significant consistency effect, which was further confirmed in Experiment 2. More importantly, the consistency effect was absent in Experiment 3, where the avatar sat with his back to the participants. These findings imply that the consistency effect reflects the automatic computation of others' visual information, and rule out the attention-cueing account of the consistency effect.
有人认为，即使是在他人的视觉体验中，人类也可以隐含地和自动地进行心理理论推断。就视觉观点采择（即推断他人的视觉体验）而言，点视角任务被认为提供了支持这一假设的证据。当人们的视觉体验与他人不一致时（称为一致性效应），他们的反应会变慢。然而，一致性效应的具体潜在认知过程一直是激烈争论的话题，即一致性效应是否代表心理理论等社会认知过程。在这里，我们引入了点视角任务的一个修改版本，其中所有的目标都出现在头像注视的位置，而由于可能阻挡头像视线的障碍物，一些目标对头像不可见。因此，在修改后的范式中，可以更好地将视角采择和注意提示的效果分离。实验 1 的结果表明存在显著的一致性效应，实验 2 进一步证实了这一结果。更重要的是，当头像背对着参与者时，实验 3 中不存在一致性效应。这些发现表明，一致性效应反映了对他人视觉信息的自动计算，排除了一致性效应的注意提示解释。
