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Specific to whose body? Perspective-taking and the spatial mapping of valence
Jonathan F Kominsky1, Daniel Casasanto
1Department of Psychology, Yale University New Haven, CT, USA.
Frontiers in Psychology
|May 30, 2013
Summary
Understanding spatial perspective-taking reveals how people map abstract concepts like "good" and "bad" onto space. Shifting perspective changes these associations, influencing judgments based on the other person's body and motor fluency.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Spatial Cognition
- Embodied Cognition
Background:
- Abstract concepts like 'good' and 'bad' are often spatialized based on an individual's handedness and egocentric spatial frames.
- Previous research links spatial fluency with valence, associating 'good' with the dominant hand's side and 'bad' with the non-dominant hand's side.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how taking another's spatial perspective influences the spatial mapping of abstract concepts 'good' and 'bad'.
- To determine if judgments shift from an egocentric (self-based) to an allocentric (other-based) frame of reference when perspective-taking is engaged.
Main Methods:
- Three experiments were conducted where participants judged the placement of 'good' and 'bad' stimuli relative to a depicted character.
- The character's spatial perspective was manipulated (e.g., schematic, photographic, with salient body attributes like an injured hand).
- Participants' own handedness and the character's perspective were varied to assess their influence on space-valence mappings.
Main Results:
- Participants spatialized 'good' and 'bad' according to the character's perspective, especially when the character was depicted realistically or had salient body features.
- A 180° rotation of the character reversed the space-valence mapping, demonstrating a shift from egocentric to allocentric reference frames.
- Judgments increasingly relied on the character's bodily attributes (e.g., injured hand) rather than the participant's own body when adopting the character's perspective.
Conclusions:
- Taking another person's spatial perspective promotes the use of allocentric frames of reference for computing space-valence associations.
- These associations are influenced by the perceived motor fluency and bodily specifics of the other individual, not solely one's own.
- Embodied cognition principles extend to social perspective-taking, where judgments are grounded in the perceived physical characteristics and actions of others.
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