Partner effects and individual differences on perspective taking

Abstract

Spatial perspective taking, in which people mentally adopt another person's view of the world, is a crucial component of everyday communication. We investigate spatial perspective taking in listeners interpreting ambiguous instructions from a partner, looking at how this behaviour varies with a human vs. computer partner (Exp. 1 and 2), and with individual differences in social and cognitive abilities (Exp. 3). Listeners' perspective taking tendencies vary with their individual differences in spatial orientation ability, with more othercentricism associated with better spatial orientation. In addition, partner identity influences perspective taking; however, in contrast to previous work, we find higher levels of egocentricism with a computer than a human partner.