Involuntary Integration of Another Person's Perceptual Activity Outcomes into the Individual's Own Perceptual Activity

Abstract

Monitoring of someone’s behavior is accompanied by integrating the results of another person’s cognitive activity into our own. We assumed that the process of such integration occurs involuntarily and automatically. The subjects watched “silent” video clips, where the character looked beyond the frame and demonstrated a behavior, pointing that he recognized an object of a certain category at the end of the video. Then the subjects observed the scene from the character’s perspective, demonstrating what he or she saw. The subjects’ task was to find a visually noticeable letter on these frames as quickly as possible. Healthy individuals (N=70) and patients with schizophrenia (N=34) took part in the study. The healthy subjects who observed the character’s behavior automatically analyzed the object perceived by the character, and only after that they searched for the target letter, in contrast to healthy participants who did not see the observer’s behavior. Patients with schizophrenia who understood the character’s behavior, in contrast to patients who did not, first of all analyzed the object perceived by the character and spent more time detecting the target letter. The study showed that integrating cognitions with observed person is a principally automatic process.