Real-time Perspective Taking: When Your Decision is Influenced Through Visual Competition

Real-time Perspective Taking: When Your Decision is Influenced Through Visual Competition Michelle D. Greenwood (mgreenwood@ucmerced.edu) Cognitive and Information Sciences, 5200 North Lake Road Merced, CA 95348 USA Michael J. Spivey (spivey@ucmerced.edu) Cognitive and Information Sciences, 5200 North Lake Road Merced, CA 95348 USA Abstract People often tacitly assume an egocentric perspective when describing spatial scenes, and then use ambiguous descriptions (e.g., “The bottle is on the left.”). However, they can also take an alternative perspective, for instance referencing an agent that is present in the scene to reduce ambiguity (e.g., “The bottle is on your right.”). In this experiment, participants viewed a computer screen that contained a photograph of a basket on a table. Participants were given ambiguous spatial relationship directions for placing the objects (trials) in the scene (e.g., “Place the X to the right of the basket.”). The goal was to determine, through mousetracking, how often people choose an other-centric perspective, and if they chose an egocentric perspective did they consider other viewpoints. Results showed that the visual input (conditions) influenced the initiation times and maximum deviation of an egocentric response when a person was present in the scene compared to when a person was absent. Keywords: perspective taking; viewpoint; affordances; other-centric Introduction In everyday conversation, spatial descriptions are ubiquitous. People often have to explain where they are in physical space, including their position relative to other people or objects. Sometimes these descriptions are ambiguous. For example, imagine that Bob and Julie are sitting on opposite ends of a table, and two coffee cups are placed on the table. Bob says to Julie, “The cup on the right is mine. ” Which cup is Bob referring to? The cup on Bob’s right, or the cup on Julie’s right? The answer depends on perspective. People often take an egocentric perspective when describing a spatial scene (Piaget & Inhelder, 1956; Pick & Lockman, 1981; Shelton & McNamara, 1997). However, they can also choose another perspective by adopting the viewpoint of another person or object (e.g., “The dent is on the car’s front left fender”, “A mosquito is on your right shoulder”). Object anchoring is one way people take an other-centric perspective. They use a particular object or person to describe the location of another object or person (e.g., “Mary is on John’s right”) (Schober, 1993; see also Borghi, Glenberg, & Kaschak, 2004). They can also vary intonation patterns or use gesture (Clark, 1996). In recent years, many researchers have argued that the egocentric perspective is the default mechanism in conversation (Hanna, & Tanenhaus 2004; Horton & Keysar, 1996; Keysar, Barr, Balin & Brauner, 2000; Tversky, Lee & Mainwaring, 1999; Nadig & Sedivy, 2002). Critically, however, there are circumstances that give rise to an other- centric perspective (Tversky & Hard, 2009). A considerable amount of psycholinguistic literature has treated the egocentric perspective in language processing as a default mode that is enforced by the cognitive architecture of the language processing system (Epley, Keysar, Van Boven, & Gilovich, 2004; Horton & Keysar, 1996; Keysar et al., 2000). In that account, factors that might encourage an accommodation of another’s perspective come into play during a second stage of processing after an initial egocentric anchoring point has been assumed. An alternative approach has been to treat egocentric biases and “other” centric biases as competing against one another simultaneously and on equal footing (Hanna & Tanenhaus, 2004; Hanna, Tanenhaus, & Trueswell, 2003; Nadig & Sedivy, 2002). Much research shows a preference for egocentric perspective in viewing scenes, but little is known about how or why this occurs. Tversky and Hard (2009) began to explore these questions in a novel study using photographs. Participants viewed pictures of objects (water bottle or book) and explained where the objects were in relation to one another. If a person also appeared in the picture (facing the participant), participants occasionally accommodated that person’s perspective and chose it over their own. Tversky and Hard also manipulated the question to highlight action in the scene, which yielded interesting differences, such as increased other-centric perspective taking. Their findings provide an excellent foundation for exploring the role of viewpoint in spatial descriptions. Choosing another’s perspective when describing a spatial scene seems like a natural way to help achieve mutual understanding when another person is present. But to what extent does this generalize? Previous work (Greenwood, Matlock, Matthews, & Spivey, 2010, 2011, & 2013) suggests participants sometimes take a perspective other than their own when there are