An Investigation Exploring The Effects Of Empathy On Spontaneous Visual Perspective-Taking in Humans

Abstract

Humans live in a dynamic social world and possess advanced Theory of Mind capabilities that facilitate our navigation of these complex environments. One subcomponent of Theory of Mind is visual perspective-taking, an individual’s ability to represent the visual field of another being (Flavell, 1977). Although this process is typically considered to be explicit in its computation, perspective-taking can also occur implicitly or spontaneously (Samson et al., 2010). Far less is known about the flexibility of spontaneous perspective-taking and how it may be influenced by other fundamental social processes such as state empathy. With empathy being our ability to recognise, understand and share the emotional states of others (e.g., Cuff et al., 2016), many consider empathy and perspective-taking to be distinct but not mutually exclusive. In this thesis I set out to investigate if and how state empathy has an effect on spontaneous perspective-taking. After validating my own empathy inducing stimuli (experiment 1), I incorporated it within a shortened-modified Dot Perspective Task paradigm. As a paradigm investigating spontaneous perspective taking abilities, the Dot Perspective Task requires participants to make rapid judgments regarding the content of either their own visual field or that of a displayed avatar. Across trials, where the two perspectives are consistent or inconsistent with each other, participants typically make two types of errors, reflected in greater error rates and slower response times: egocentric intrusion (processing your own perspective hinders judgements you make regarding someone else’s) and altercentric intrusion errors (processing another’s perspective negatively impacts judgements you make on your own). Aiming to investigate the precise nature of empathy’s influence on implicit perspective taking, I tested two hypotheses with divergent predictions. According to the self-other distinction hypothesis, empathy makes perception of the self and other more salient, and predicts greater egocentric and altercentric intrusion when the two perspectives do not differ. Alternatively, according to the self-other merging hypothesis, representations of the two perspectives can blur, which predicts greater intrusion effects when the two perspectives do differ. In study 1, I validated my empathy induction protocol by showing that stimuli elicit state empathy in participants. Then in a pilot of the main experiment 2, I found preliminary support for the self-other distinction hypothesis. However, this finding was not replicated in the main experiment, with evidence of no significant effect of condition (empathy vs baseline) on spontaneous perspective-taking. This discrepancy thus makes it hard to draw strong conclusions regarding empathy’s effect on spontaneous perspective taking. However, replicating literature employing the original paradigm, I did reliably document egocentric intrusion errors; this demonstrates that this paradigm can successfully be adapted to an online format with fewer trials. As a result, this thesis enables novel future directions with Dot Perspective Task paradigm adaptations and empathy induction methods whilst demonstrating the importance of replication in science.