Virtual Avatar Automatically Enhances Human Perspective Taking

Abstract

Reasoning about other people’s mind is important to successful social communication. Visual perspective taking is the basic ability to infer others’ mind, denoting the process of judgment what and how a certain object looks from the others’ viewpoint. Recent research showed that the understanding of how a target appears to another person occurs spontaneously. However, the details of the process have not yet been clear. We aimed to investigate whether visual perspective taking occur in a virtual environment and how fast the process is. In an experiment, participant judged the direction of visual stimulus from the viewpoint of a humanoid avatar and responded using joystick. To know the time course of the perspective taking, we manipulated the interval time between the appearance of humanoid avatar and the target visual stimulus presentation. We found that the existence of humanoid avatar improves the performance of the visual perspective taking task in quick interval time condition. This result suggests that the visual perspective-taking is enhanced by the virtual avatar in a very fast time scale.