Spontaneous Perspective Taking: The Synergistic Effect Of Implicit Mentalizing With Submentalizing

Perspective taking is the psychological process that individuals fully consider the characteristics and situation of others,imaging and inferring other’ mental states,and predicting the behavior of others accordingly.The essential feature of perspective taking lies in decentration of individual’s cognition,which is able to think from others’ point of view,and look at the problem from the perspective of others.Spontaneous perspective taking refers to the fact that when individuals are not explicitly asked to follow another person’s point of view,they will still follow the beliefs of others or be influenced by the perspective of them.Researchers have not reached consensus on the nature of this phenomenon for now."Implicit mentalizing" holds that this is based on the understanding of the mental state of others.While submentalizing believes it is a phenomenon that domain-general cognitive mechanisms simulate the effects of mentalizing in social contexts.For the automatic visual perspective taking-the phenomenon of being influenced by others’ visual perspective automatically,implicit mentalizing views that individuals automatically understands the mental state of others,while submentalizing believes visual cues effect influence the behavior of participants.Through the arrangement of experiment scenes,this study weakened or even eliminated the visual cues effect that may exist in the process of perspective taking,in order to eliminate the submentalizing and investigate whether participants can automatically adopt the opinions of others.This provided more evidence for the arguments of the two views,and examined the ability of perspective taking about someone invisible.Experiment 1 used the joint task paradigm,through a 3(scenario: alone or someone visible or someone invisible)× 2(digital consistency: consistent or inconsistent)complete within-subject design,we measured the response time and error rate of the participant on the task.Experiment 1 examines when participants were able to see the target,the influence of scenario on automatic perspective taking.The results showed that compared with alone scenario,on someone visible and someone invisible scenario,the response gap between the two levels of the figures is greater.In experiment 2,a person sit on a chair behind the participants,thus eliminating the influence of the person’s images on the participants.Experiment 2 is also a 3(scenario: alone or someone visible or someone invisible)× 2(digital consistency: consistent or inconsistent)complete within-subject design,to examine when participants can’t see the target,the influence of scenario on automatic perspective taking.The results showed that only when others can see the figures,the reaction of the subjects under the condition of digital consistency was significantly faster than that of the inconsistent conditions.This study draws the following conclusions:(1)No matter whether the adult participants can see the target of perspective taking,he or she can automatically adopt target’s visual perspective.(2)In the real scene,when the participants can see the perspective taking target,he or she will be affected by the visual cues effect.(3)When the participants can not see the target of perspective taking,they can also understand their mental state.