Automaticallo Taking Level-2 Perspective Of Another Person Who Is Out Of Our Sight

Perspective-taking refers to observing the world from the view of others,which is one of the important foundations of theory of mind.The traditional studies of theory of mind mainly used false belief paradigm with explicit instructions to ask people about another person's perspective.And they found that perspective-taking is a complex social cognitive behavior that happened relatively slow,consumed cognitive resources and took executive functions to occur.However,through new paradigms,recent studies have found that people can not only reason other people's beliefs when explicitly instructed,but also automatically register the mental state of others without task requirements.Moreover,when there is a conflict between one's own perspective and that of the others',an interference effect may be observed on the current task's performance,even if others'perspectives are not related to the task.This phenomenon is called automatic perspective-taking.However,these studies above only considered certain contexts in which the to-be-taking-perspective person was at presence in our sight.In our daily life,other person may be temporally out of our sight due to occlusion,saccades and movements,but the perspective of him still matters.So far,only one study explored the automatic level-1 perspective-taking to the unseen person,and level-2 of which remains unexplored.There is remarkable distinction between the level-1 and level-2 perspective-taking on cognitive mechanism and developmental trajectory.Thus,the conclusions about level-1 perspective-taking may not directly generalized to level-2.Therefore,this study focused on the situations when other person was out of our sight,to investigate how automatic level-2 perspective-taking would occur,and how different context would impact on it.Through three experiments,the author explored the likelihood that people would take level-2 perspective of other person who were out of sight.By showing an occluded character or a character leaving in different ways within a 10s video material,the author used a free response paradigm to test whether a participant automatically took the perspective of that character.The video with no one showed up was set as a baseline.These three experiments obtained the following main results:(1)Under the conditions of occlusion and departure,the proportion of participants answering question from the character'view was higher than the baseline condition,indicating that people automatically took the perspective of the character who were out of sight;(2)Under different departure conditions,the likelihood of automatic perspective-taking varied,suggesting that different social contexts would regulate automatic perspective-taking;(3)Whether or not the character could see the current situation after his leaving had a significant influence on people's automatic perspective-taking.In conclusion,this study showed that people would automatically adopt the perspective of other person who were out of sight,and that people would overcome natural egocentric bias to consider how the same object could be viewed differently by another person.And social cognitive system would integrate factors such as other person's spatial location,eye-sight occlusion and social relationship to conduct an automatic level-2 perspective-taking.