Spontaneous visual perspective-taking with constant attention cue: A modified dot-perspective task paradigm

It has been argued that humans can employ mentalizing implicitly and automatically, even with others' visual experiences. In terms of visual perspective-taking (i.e., inferring another's visual experience), the Dot Perspective Task has been considered to provide evidence for this hypothesis. People were found to respond slower when their visual experience was inconsistent with others' (referred to as the consistency effect). However, the specific underlying cognitive process of the consistency effect has been a topic of intense debate, i.e., whether the consistency effect represents a process of social cognition such as mentalizing. Here, we introduce a modified version of the Dot Perspective Task, in which all the targets appear at the position where the avatar is gazing, while some of the targets are invisible to the avatar due to a barrier that may block the avatar's line of sight. Therefore, the effect of perspective-taking and attention-cueing can be better disassociated in the modified paradigm. The results of Experiment 1 illustrated a significant consistency effect, which was further confirmed in Experiment 2. More importantly, the consistency effect was absent in Experiment 3, where the avatar sat with his back to the participants. These findings imply that the consistency effect reflects the automatic computation of others' visual information, and rule out the attention-cueing account of the consistency effect.