Signatures of cognitive difficulty in perspective-taking: is the egocentric perspective always the easiest to adopt?

Abstract

In a series of experiments we examined factors that contribute to the difficulty of spatial perspective-taking and influence perspective selection. Listeners received instructions to select an object from a speaker whose depicted position varied (Experiments 1, 2, 2B). Responding from the speaker’s perspective was slower than responding egocentrically, and was slower at large oblique offsets (135°, 225°) than at the maximum offset (180°). Experiment 2B confirmed that this was not due to the number of objects in configurations. Experiment 3 suggested that the ease of adopting the imagined egocentric perspective depended on its alignment with the sensorimotor perspective. Still, perspective preference was not influenced by the documented cost of adopting perspectives, but rather by social attributions (e.g. believing that the partner was the experimenter, Exp 1, vs. another participant, Exp 2, 2B, 3). These findings have implications for understanding behaviour in contexts where interlocutors interact remotely while adopting disembodied perspectives.