Abstract:

Understanding what others think and see is crucial for social interactions. Previous studies have shown that people can spontaneously infer what an individual sees. Still, it is unclear whether they can spontaneously calculate what a group sees at a group level. To investigate this question, this study employed a novel visual perspective-taking paradigm that required participants to judge their own perspective from the picture that four avatars who either looked at the same objects or looked at different objects. We found that participants could not easily ignore what the group saw when making self-perspective judgments. This effect occurred even when the avatars looked at different objects, but not when they were replaced by arrows with similar low-level features. This suggests that people can spontaneously calculate what a group sees, and this process is driven by the social group information, rather than by the physical directionality.

Key words: visual perspective-taking, group-perspective, self-perspective, spontaneous processing