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What's so difficult with adopting imagined perspectives?
Marios N Avraamides1, Adamantini Hatzipanayioti, Alexia Galati
1Department of Psychology, University of Cyprus, P.O. Box 20537, 1678, Nicosia, Cyprus, mariosav@ucy.ac.cy.
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.
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