Real-time Perspective Taking: When Your Decision is Influenced Through Visual Competition

People often tacitly assume an egocentric perspective when describing spatial scenes, and then use ambiguous descriptions (e.g., “The bottle is on the left.”). However, they can also take an alternative perspective, for instance referencing an agent that is present in the scene to reduce ambiguity (e.g., “The bottle is on your right.”). In this experiment, participants viewed a computer screen that contained a photograph of a basket on a table. Participants were given ambiguous spatial relationship directions for placing the objects (trials) in the scene (e.g., “Place the X to the right of the basket.”). The goal was to determine, through mousetracking, how often people choose an other-centric perspective, and if they chose an egocentric perspective did they consider other viewpoints. Results showed that the visual input (conditions) influenced the initiation times and maximum deviation of an egocentric response when a person was present in the scene compared to when a person was absent.