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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

The influence of sensory and social factors on spatial perspective taking

Résumé

Information can be perceived from a first-person perspective, central for the unity of the self or a third-person perspective necessary for communicating spatial knowledge. I will present studies showing the multifaceted nature of perspective-taking and in particular how sensory and social factors influence people’s ability to flexibly change spatial perspectives. Supporting Summary of the corresponding Symposium : Perspective-taking is a multifaceted process, that aims at representing another social agent’s mind to understand it better. However, this process is far from being fully understood, for many reasons. First, perspective-taking is studied across many research areas, for example, in cognitive, social, clinical, developmental psychology and neuroscience, and these fields differ in which mental states they investigate. Second, there is large disagreement about the underlying mechanisms of perspective-taking. Finally, it remains unclear whether the same mechanisms are involved in the same way for everyone. The present symposium seeks to bring together experts in the field to present a variety of different perspective-taking tasks with a specific focus on the psychological processes shared between them. The two key mechanisms discussed to underlie perspective-taking that will guide the symposium are theoretical prediction and mental simulation. The first talk of the symposium discusses evidence for the involvement of sensorimotor simulations in some but not all perspectives. The talk outlines the function of sensory and social factors as they relate to the computation of different perspectives. The second talk also addresses the involvement of the body in different kinds of perspective-taking, specifically spatial and emotional perspective-taking. These two talks show that bodily signals can affect perspective-taking processes, supporting the view that they involve mental simulation, which can be affected by momentary states of the body. However, the question of whether simulations are a feasible mechanism to understand all mental states, and the question of the nature of what is being simulated if a simulation happens remains an open one. To address these two questions, the third talk also incorporates Theory of Mind (ToM) as a more cognitive kind of perspective-taking and focuses on the representational aspect of the process. These studies show that an actual visual representation of another person’s sight is likely not involved in visual perspective-taking, and thus question whether any mental simulation happens during the process. They outline that mental simulation might be useful to understand some but not all mental states in others. The final talk addresses subprocesses that are involved in any kind of perspective-taking, namely the ability to distinguish between the self and the other, as well as the priority given to either the self or the other. These subprocesses, as well as the nature of the perspective-taking task to be solved, might determine which mechanism is recruited for perspective-taking. This talk also discusses how prevalent these processes are in different clinical populations. The symposium will close with a joint discussion of all findings, which will be embedded in a process model of perspective-taking that considers the person, the task, the strategy, and the process level to allow for more fine-grained predictions about who engages in perspective-taken when, and how. The overall purpose of this symposium is not only to merge together the diverse innovative research on the mechanisms underlying perspective-taking but also to highlight new perspectives.
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Dates et versions

hal-04304937 , version 1 (24-11-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04304937 , version 1

Citer

Malika Auvray. The influence of sensory and social factors on spatial perspective taking. International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS), Mar 2023, Bruxelles, France. ⟨hal-04304937⟩
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