Computational Modeling of Embodied Visual Perspective Taking

Embodied and disembodied cognition: spatial perspective-taking.

Although people can take spatial perspectives different from their own, it is widely assumed that egocentric perspectives are natural and have primacy. Two studies asked respondents to describe the spatial relations between two objects on a table in photographed scenes; in some versions, a person sitting behind the objects was either looking at or reaching for one of the objects. The mere prese...

Modeling Perspective-Taking by Correlating Visual and Proprioceptive Dynamics

How do we manage to step into another person’s shoes and eventually derive the intention behind observed behavior? We propose a connectionist neural network (NN) model that learns self-supervised a prerequisite of this social capability: it adapts its internal perspective in accordance to observed biological motion. The model first learns predictive correlations between proprioceptive motion an...

The use of embodied self-rotation for visual and spatial perspective-taking

Previous research has shown that calculating if something is to someone's left or right involves a simulative process recruiting representations of our own body in imagining ourselves in the position of the other person (Kessler and Rutherford, 2010). We compared left and right judgements from another's spatial position (spatial perspective judgements) to judgements of how a numeral appeared fr...

Embodied Perspective Taking in Learning About Complex Systems

Two kinds of visual perspective taking.

Visual perspective taking can be used to determine where objects are located relative toanother agent, or whether the agent can see a particular object. Four experiments indicated that different processes provide these different kinds of information. When participants were asked to report whether an object was to the left or to the right of another agent, response times (RTs) increased with inc...