The role of potential agents in making spatial perspective taking social

Abstract

A striking relationship between visual spatial perspective taking (VSPT) and social skills has been demonstrated for perspective-taking tasks in which the target of the imagined or inferred perspective is a potential agent, suggesting that the presence of a potential agent may create a social context for the seemingly spatial task of imagining a novel visual perspective. In a series of studies, we set out to investigate how and when a target might be viewed as sufficiently agent-like to incur a social influence on VSPT performance. By varying the perceptual and conceptual features that defined the targets as potential agents, we find that even something as simple as suggesting animacy for a simple wooden block may be sufficient. More critically, we found that experience with one potential agent influenced the performance with subsequent targets, either by inducing or eliminating the influence of social skills on VSPT performance. These carryover effects suggest that the relationship between social skills and VSPT performance is mediated by a complex relationship that includes the task, the target, and the context in which that target is perceived. These findings highlight potential problems that arise when identifying a task as belonging exclusively to a single cognitive domain and stress instead the highly interactive nature of cognitive domains and their susceptibility to cross-domain individual differences.

Keywords: agency; individual differences; perspective taking; social skills; spatial cognition.

Figure 1

Potential framework depicting the relationship between social skills and VSPT performance for proposed socially-relevant and non-social VSPT. The distinction between these two types of tasks is captured by the degree to which VSPT is incurring a social skill influence indexed by the magnitude of the correlation.

Figure 2

Example of one of the three buildings displays showing the different target conditions used in the Experiments: upper left (Experiments 1 and 3), upper right (Experiment 1), lower left and right (Experiment 2).

Figure 3

VSPT performance (mean accuracy and response latency) as a function of the target conditions for Experiment 1. Error bars reflect ±1 standard error of the mean.

Figure 4

VSPT performance as a function of social ineptitude score separately for the plain triangles (left) and triangles-with-eyes (right) conditions broken out by order for Experiment 1.

Figure 5

VSPT performance (mean accuracy and response latency) as a function of the target conditions for Experiment 2. Error bars reflect ±1 standard error of the mean.

Figure 6

VSPT performance as a function of social ineptitude score separately for the artist figures (left) and fashion dolls (right) conditions broken out by order for Experiment 2.

Figure 7

VSPT performance as a function of social ineptitude score for the triangle aliens condition.