The Effects Of State Anxiety And Cognitive Load On Visual Perspective Taking

We may constantly have disputes and conflicts with other people in our daily life.The key to resolving conflicts is the ability of perspective taking,that is,the ability to accurately distinguish own knowledge and experience from what others see and hear,then infer others' perspectives or mental states based on them.Especially under specific emotion and cognitive load conditions,people may be constrained by egocentrism,and unable to take others' perspectives effectively.This problem is becoming one of the hot issues that psychologists pay attention to.The paradigms of level 1 perspective taking(L1-VPT)and level 2 perspective taking(L2-VPT)are used to investigate the influential factors and mechanisms of perspective taking.L1-VPT refers to the reasoning of whether something can be seen in different perspectives.L2-VPT refers to the reasoning of seeing different representations of the same thing from different perspectives.In both two levels of perspective taking paradigms,when individuals make explicit judgment of their own perspectives,they will be interfered by other's perspective.Researchers call this unconscious and rapid processing of other people's visual information as spontaneous calculation.It should be pointed out that according to the previous estimation method of spontaneous calculation,it fails to distinguish implicit calculation of other's perspective from explicit selection of own perspective.But with the development of the researches,new estimation method has been used to distinguish these two processes.In addition,studies have shown that state anxiety can affect people's abilities of social cognition,including the ability of perspective taking.According to the Attentional Control Theory,when individuals experience state anxiety,they will be affected by worried thoughts and distracted stimulus,resulting in the reduction of cognitive resources required for the current task and the increase of cognitive load.It has not been concluded whether cognitive resources should be involved in the two levels perspective taking and their two processes.And under the condition of high cognitive load,the influence of state anxiety on the two processes of perspective taking needs to be further studied.Therefore,this study will explore the effects of state anxiety and cognitive load on the visual perspective taking.In this study,L1-VPT task(experiment 1)and L2-VPT task(experiment 2)were separately used to explore the effects of state anxiety and cognitive load on the two levels'perspective taking.Both of the two visual perspective taking tasks were set to report from the perspective of self and others,and both of them had consistent and inconsistent information from the perspective of self and others.The difference between the two is that L1-VPT task requires judging the number of objects seen from two perspectives,while L2-VPT task requires judging the number representation.Sixty-four undergraduates took participated in the experiment 1.After recalling their own anxiety or neutral emotional experience to induce corresponding emotions,participants were asked to complete Ll-VPT task,and different levels of cognitive load were induced by setting different time pressures(the reaction deadline was 1200ms or 600ms respectively)in the tasks.The emotional and cognitive load inducing tasks of experiment 2 and experiment 1 are the same,except that another 70 subjects are asked to complete L2-VPT tasks.After calculating the average error rate of self trials on L1-VPT and L2-VPT task,calculation parameters which index for implicit calculation process and detection parameters which index for explicit selection process,this study investigate the effects of state anxiety and cognitive load on L1-VPT and L2-VPT,and the differences between the two factors in the two levels of visual perspective taking tasks by using SPSS 24.0 to analysis these data.The results of the study found that:(1)The average error rate of inconsistent condition found in Ll-VPT and L2-VPT tasks was significantly higher than that of consistent condition.(2)Compared with the low cognitive load condition,the detection parameter was significantly lower and the calculation parameter was significantly higher under the high cognitive load condition.(3)Compared with neutral emotion,the calculation parameter of state anxiety was significantly lower and the detection parameter was significantly higher in Ll-VPT tasks;in L2-VPT tasks,the calculation parameter of state anxiety was significantly higher,while the detection parameter was significantly lower.This study draws the following conclusions:(1)High cognitive load promotes the implicit calculation of the two levels of visual perspective taking,but hinders the explicit selection.(2)State anxiety has different effects on the explicit selection of own perspective and implicit calculation of other's perspective.The results of this study provide further experimental evidence to reveal the differences and connections between the two levels visual perspective taking and their two processes,and to deepen the understanding of the effects of cognitive load and state anxiety on social cognitive processing.