Transient other-perspective contextual cueing in a visuospatial perspective-taking task

Human beings inhabit a world abundant in environmental contexts, and our cognitive processing is invariably influenced by the contextual information surrounding us. Previous research has examined how contextual information is processed and utilized to facilitate visual processing when individuals naturally perceive the world from their own perspectives. However, as social beings, individuals are often encouraged to adopt the perspective of others to enhance social interaction. Then, how does our brain process contextual information when we are adopting someone else's perspective to perceive the world? Is it processed in an allocentric manner from the adopted perspective, or does it remain anchored egocentrically to the individual's own standpoint? The current study addresses these questions by integrating a modified contextual cueing paradigm with a perspective-taking task. By examining how prior exposure to contextual stimuli presented from an alternative perspective influences subsequent processing from one's own perspective, we found that when individuals intentionally process target objects from another's viewpoint, non-target contextual information can also be automatically processed from that perspective, rather than their own. However, the other-perspective contextual cueing is transient and diminishes with repeated practice in that perspective. These findings suggest that the processing of contextual information during perspective taking is a dynamic process rather than a static mechanism. We discussed potential causes of this phenomenon and proposed directions for future research.