Manipulating avatar age and gender in level-2 visual perspective taking

Ford, Ben ORCID: 0000-0001-7502-7505, Monk, R., Litchfield, D. and Qureshi, A. (2023) Manipulating avatar age and gender in level-2 visual perspective taking. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 30. pp. 1431-1441. doi:10.3758/s13423-023-02249-7

Preview

Text 13864 Ford et al (2023) Manipulating avatar age and gender in level-2 visual perspective taking.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (797kB) | Preview

Abstract

Visual perspective taking (VPT) represents how the world appears from another person’s position. The age, group status and emotional displays of the other person have been shown to affect task performance, but tasks often confound social and spatial outcome measures by embedding perspective taking in explicitly social contexts or theory-of-mind reasoning. Furthermore, while previous research has suggested that visual perspective taking may be impacted by avatar characteristics, it is unknown whether this is driven by general group processing or a specific deficit in mentalizing about outgroups, for example, children. Therefore, using a minimally social task (i.e., the task was not communicative, and acknowledging the “mind” of the avatar was not necessitated), we examined whether avatar age and avatar gender affect performance on simpler (low angular disparity) and more effortful, embodied (high angular disparity) perspective judgments. Ninety-two participants represented the visuospatial perspectives of a boy, girl, man, or woman who were presented at various angular disparities. A target object was placed in front of the avatar and participants responded to the orientation of the object from the avatar’s position. The findings suggest that social features of visuospatial perspective taking (VSPT) are processed separately from the fundamental spatial computations. Further, Level-2 VSPT appears to be affected by general group categorization (e.g., age and gender) rather than a deficit in mentalizing about a specific outgroup (e.g., children).

Item Type:	Article
Article Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Visual perspective taking; Avatar characteristics; Social cues; Spatial processing
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions:	Schools and Research Institutes > School of Education and Science
Research Priority Areas:	Health, Life Sciences, Sport and Wellbeing
Depositing User:	Ben Ford
Date Deposited:	27 Mar 2024 20:54
Last Modified:	28 Mar 2024 08:00
URI:	https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/13864

University Staff: Request a correction | Repository Editors: Update this record