Can We Really "See" Through Others' Eyes? Evidence of Embodied Visual-Spatial Representation From an Altercentric...

Social interactions often require the ability to "stand in others' shoes" and perceive the world "through others' eyes," but it remains unclear the extent to which we can actually see others' visual worlds. Prior research has primarily focused on mental-body transformation in visual-spatial perspective taking (VSPT), yet the subsequent visual processing under the adopted perspective has been less explored. Addressing this gap, our study investigated mental representation of the visual scene as a direct outcome of perceiving from another's viewpoint. Using modified VSPT tasks, we paired avatar-perspective trials with self-perspective trials to create opportunities for observing priming effects resulting from potential mental representations formed under the avatar's perspective. We hypothesized that if individuals form embodied representations of visual scenes while explicitly processing stimuli from the avatar's viewpoint, these representations should be stored in memory, and elicit priming effects when later encountering similar scenes from their own perspective. Across four experiments, we provide the first evidence that (1) explicitly engaging in embodied VSPT produces robust mental representations of the visual scene from the adopted perspective, (2) these representations are visual-spatial rather than semantic in nature, and (3) these representations arise from embodied processing rather than from self-perspective strategies. Additionally, our findings reveal that individuals implicitly process visual stimuli from their own perspective during other-perspective tasks, forming distinct but weaker self-perspective representations. Overall, our findings demonstrate the existence of embodied representations in VSPT and offer significant insights into the processing mechanisms involved when we "stand in others' shoes."