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Published on: October 27, 2016
Teleporting into walls? The irrelevance of the physical world in embodied perspective-taking
Steven Samuel1,2, Sarah Salo3, Tiia Ladvelin4
1School of Psychology, University of Plymouth, Portland Square, Drake Circus, Plymouth, PL4 8AA, UK. samuel@plymouth.ac.uk.
Abstract:
Embodied theories of Level 2 visual perspective-taking usually assume that we imagine ourselves in other real-world locations to take perspectives. We tested this assertion by giving participants an embodied perspective-taking task in which they were instructed to make manual responses based on imagined perspectives. Importantly, on half of the trials, the location of the alternative perspective was not physically possible (i.e., blocked with a wall). Across two experiments, results showed that participants performed just as well for the physically impossible perspectives as for accessible ones. We interpret these data as evidence that embodied perspective-taking is agnostic to local physical features of our environment.
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