Taking my perspective or yours? The influence of personality traits, psychopathological traits, and interoceptive abilities
Résumé
The ability to constantly alternate between our point of view and someone else’s corresponds to a flexibility of perspective-taking present in typical adults. During social interactions, adopting a perspective centered on others is necessary to communicate with them. This ability requires access to our interlocutor's visuo-spatial experience. On the other hand, adopting a self-centered spatial perspective in an egocentric frame of reference, the origin of which is our body, is central to the unity of the self, inherent in bodily self-awareness. These two types of spatial perspective thus correspond to different requirements. How do we juggle between them? The graphesthesia task we developed, in which ambiguous tactile symbols are tactually presented on the body and can be interpreted differently depending on the spatial perspective, allows measuring how people differ in the spatial perspectives they naturally adopt. In addition, it allows investigating people’s ability to flexibly change spatial perspectives, a measure that is often neglected by other perspective-taking tasks. In this talk, through three sets of experiments, I will highlight how perspective-taking varies as a function of personality traits (in particular, social intelligence and anxiety), psychopathological traits (schizotypal and autistic), and interoceptive abilities (interoceptive sensibility, cardiac interoceptive accuracy and awareness). Altogether, this research aims at shedding light on the interrelations between spatial perspective taking, social cognition, and bodily self-consciousness.