The extent of default visual perspective taking in complex layouts.

Emerging research suggests that visual perspective taking might be based in part on a default, early developing cognitive process. This hypothesis receives support from experiments demonstrating that adults experience interference from task-irrelevant perspectives of depicted agents even when participants are making judgments about their own perspective. However, a number of recent articles conclude that this self-judgment interference effect may be because of simple directional cues alone, and might, therefore, not reflect processes specific to visual perspective taking. In 3 studies, we demonstrate that self-judgment interference is constrained by agents' apparent line-of-sight access to subspaces in realistic rendered scenes. Participants displayed processing costs when their perspective conflicted with that of an avatar, who faced in the direction of all possible targets but could not see some of the targets because of occlusion. This interference effect occurred using 2 different configurations of occluders, and disappeared when windows were added to the occluders, allowing avatars line of sight access to all of the targets visible to the participant. These results demonstrate that default perspective taking is not attributable to directional cues alone but instead reflects a relatively sophisticated calculation of an agent's line of sight. (PsycINFO Database Record