Sensorimotor effects in spatial perspective taking?

A common finding in spatial perspective taking is that performance suffers as the angular disparity between the observer’s actual and imagined perspectives becomes larger. This effect could be attributed to mental transformation processes required to align the two perspectives in imagery or to sensorimotor conflicts exerted by the observer’s body position and orientation in space. In this talk, I will present findings from a series of experiment carried out in my lab, aiming to understand the source of the difficulty in perspective taking. In these experiments participants viewed a spatial scene that consisted of a table with a number of empty seats around it. In each trial they were asked to imagine themselves sitting at one of the seats and point from that orientation to a virtual character that appeared sitting on another seat. Pointing error and the speed or responding were analyzed as a function of the angular disparity between participants’ actual and imagined perspectives. Several conditions were ran to examine factors that may influence the size of the angular disparity effect