Efficient social perception in adults: studies on visual perspective-taking and visual working memory

Abstract

Ten experiments examined the way that automatic processing of the visual perspectives and eye gaze of others affects adults‘ perception and encoding of the social world. I investigated the amount of flexibility that automatic visual perspective computation accommodates. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 demonstrate that automatic visual perspective-computation shows some flexibility for enumerating and representing perspective contents. Experiments 4 and 5 further indicate that automatic visual perspective-taking allows selection of relevant perspective information. I also examined whether observing others‘ eye gaze affects adults‘ visual working memory encoding. Experiments 6, 7, and 8 indicate that agents‘ object-oriented gaze does not lead to more efficient encoding of agent and object information. Experiments 9 and 10 demonstrate that observing others‘ participant-oriented gaze disrupts visual working memory encoding. I argue that although adults have minimal conscious control over the activation of visual perspective-computation and processing of participantoriented gaze, the efficient mindreading system shows some flexibility.