From early in life, human infants appear capable of taking others' perspectives, and can do so even when the other's perspective conflicts with the infant's perspective. Infants' success in perspective-taking contexts implies that they are managing conflicting perspectives despite a wealth of data suggesting that doing so relies on sufficiently mature Executive Functions, and is a challenge even for adults. In a new theory, I propose that infants can take other's perspectives because they have an altercentric bias. This bias results from a combination of the value that human cognition places on others' attention, and an absence of a competing self-perspective, which would, in older children, create a conflict requiring resolution by Executive Functions. A self-perspective emerges with the development of cognitive self-awareness, sometime in the second year of life, at which point it leads to competition between perspectives. This theory provides a way of explaining infants' ability to take others' perspectives, but raises the possibility that they could do so without representing or understanding the implications of perspective for others' mental states. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Are infants altercentric? The other and the self in early social cognition.

Theory of mind (ToM) is defined as the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others and is often said to be one of the cornerstones of efficient social interaction. In recent years, a number of authors have suggested that one particular ToM process occurs spontaneously in that it is rapid and outside of conscious control. This work has argued that humans efficiently compute the visual perspective of other individuals. In this article, we present a critique of this notion both on empirical and theoretical grounds. We argue that the experiments and paradigms that purportedly demonstrate spontaneous perspective-taking have not as yet convincingly demonstrated the existence of such a phenomenon. We also suggest that it is not possible to represent the percept of another person, spontaneous or otherwise. Indeed, the perspective-taking field has suggested that humans can represent the visual experience of others. That is, going beyond assuming that we can represent another’s viewpoint in anything other than symbolic form. In this sense, the field suffers from the same problem that afflicted the “pictorial” theory in the mental imagery debate. In the last section we present a number of experiments designed to provide a more thorough assessment of whether humans can indeed represent the visual experience of others.

/pdf/the-closing-of-the-theory-of-mind-a-critique-of-perspective-1glrb1t4ei.pdf

The closing of the theory of mind: A critique of perspective-taking.

Altercentric Cognition: How Others Influence Our Cognitive Processing.

Embodied cognition theories hold that cognitive processes are grounded in bodily states. Embodied processes in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have classically been investigated in studies on imitation. Several observations suggested that unlike typical individuals who are able of copying the model's actions from the model's position, individuals with ASD tend to reenact the model's actions from their own egocentric perspective. Here, we performed two behavioral experiments to directly test the ability of ASD individuals to adopt another person's point of view. In Experiment 1, participants had to explicitly judge the left/right location of a target object in a scene from their own or the actor's point of view (visual perspective taking task). In Experiment 2, participants had to perform left/right judgments on front-facing or back-facing human body images (own body transformation task). Both tasks can be solved by mentally simulating one's own body motion to imagine oneself transforming into the position of another person (embodied simulation strategy), or by resorting to visual/spatial processes, such as mental object rotation (nonembodied strategy). Results of both experiments showed that individual with ASD solved the tasks mainly relying on a nonembodied strategy, whereas typical controls adopted an embodied strategy. Moreover, in the visual perspective taking task ASD participants had more difficulties than controls in inhibiting other-perspective when directed to keep one's own point of view. These findings suggested that, in social cognitive tasks, individuals with ASD do not resort to embodied simulation and have difficulties in cognitive control over self- and other-perspective.

“Put Myself Into Your Place”: Embodied Simulation and Perspective Taking in Autism Spectrum Disorders

On many occasions, people spontaneously or deliberately take the perspective of a person facing them rather than their own perspective. How is this done? Using a spatial perspective task in which participants were asked to identify objects at specific locations, we found that self-perspective judgments were faster for objects presented to the right, rather than the left, and for objects presented closer to the participants’ own bodies. Strikingly, taking the opposing perspective of another person led to a reversal (i.e., remapping) of these effects, with reference to the other person’s position (Experiment 1). A remapping of spatial relations was also observed when an empty chair replaced the other person (Experiment 2), but not when access to the other viewpoint was blocked (Experiment 3). Thus, when the spatial scene allows a physically feasible but opposing point of view, people respond as if their own bodies were in that place. Imagination can thus overcome perception.

When Far Becomes Near.

Humans are able to mentally adopt the spatial perspective of others and represent the visual world from their point of view. Here, we present neuropsychological evidence that information inaccessible from an egocentric perspective can be accessed from the perspective of another person. Patients affected by left neglect were asked to describe arrays of objects from their own egocentric perspective, from an opposite perspective (disembodied perspective taking), and from the point of view of another person actually seated in front of them (embodied perspective taking). Although disembodied perspective-taking ameliorated neglect severity, there was an even stronger positive effect of embodied perspective-taking: items presented on the left and neglected when reported from the egocentric perspective were instead recovered when patients assumed the perspective of the other. These findings suggest that perspective-taking entails an altercentric remapping of space, i.e. remapping of objects and locations coded with reference to the other person’s body.

/pdf/in-your-place-neuropsychological-evidence-for-altercentric-4ogkedyzk3.pdf

In your place: neuropsychological evidence for altercentric remapping in embodied perspective taking.

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In your place: neuropsychological evidence for altercentric remapping in embodied perspective taking.