The neural mechanisms of aligning spatial perspectives

Visual perspective-taking requires mentally adopting another spatial viewpoint by aligning one's own perspective with that of a reference, such as another person or object. This alignment process is thought to rely on embodied spatial transformations engaging both spatial computation and motor-related systems. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we tested whether neural responses scale with angular disparity between observer and reference viewpoints. Participants judged the relative position of objects from the perspective of either an avatar or an empty chair across alignment conditions and rotation angles. Unaligned conditions elicited stronger activation than aligned conditions in a distributed network encompassing medial frontal, premotor, opercular, posterior parietal, ventral temporal, and cerebellar regions. Both reaction time and Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent signal (BOLD) magnitude increased linearly with angular disparity, and individual differences in response time correlated with activation magnitude, linking behavioral effort to neural computation. Comparable results were obtained when the reference was a chair, indicating that these mechanisms generalize beyond social contexts. Together, these findings reveal a cerebello-frontoparietal network that supports perspective alignment through embodied simulation, spatial transformation, and predictive modeling, providing a unified account of the neural computations underlying VPT.