What’s so difficult with adopting imagined perspectives?

Abstract

Research on spatial cognition suggests that transformation processes and/or spatial conflicts may influence performance on mental perspective-taking tasks. However, conflicting findings have complicated our understanding about the processes involved in perspective-taking, particularly those giving rise to angular disparity effects, whereby performance worsens as the imagined perspective adopted deviates from one’s actual perspective. Based on data from experiments involving mental perspective-taking in immediate and remote spatial layouts, we propose here a novel account for the difficulty with perspective-taking. According to this account, the main difficulty lies in maintaining an imagined perspective in working memory, especially in the presence of salient sensorimotor information. © 2015, Marta Olivetti Belardinelli and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.