Visual perspective taking and belief processing in adults

In social situations, adults ascribe mental states to other people and to themselves. They contrast these different mental states and prioritize one of them according to the situational demands in order to understand and predict the others’ behaviour as well as to adapt their own behaviour. So far, computation and selection of competing mental states has been mainly studied for visual perspectives but remains largely unknown for more complex mental states such as beliefs. The present study addresses that issue by testing the processing of the self- and the other-belief in a context of competing beliefs and by comparing this processing to the processing of self- and the other-visual-perspective in a similar context. Adult participants were asked to perform the visual perspective task developed by Samson et al. (2010) and an adapted version of this task to belief scenarios. We tested whether the other-belief interfered with the processing of the self-belief (i.e., altercentric bias) when the latter had to be prioritized at the time of belief computation and whether this interference effect was smaller than the egocentric bias (i.e., the effect of the self-belief on the processing of the other-belief), as it has been shown for visual perspective taking (Samson et al., 2010). In addition, we tested whether inter-individual differences in terms of egocentric and altercentric biases showed some consistencies between visual perspectives and beliefs. Results showed altercentric and egocentric biases, with an asymmetry in favour of the egocentric bias, in the two tasks. These biases did not significantly correlate between the two tasks. Nevertheless, almost all participants who showed a bias in the belief task showed the same bias in the visual perspective task while the reverse was not true. In conclusion, the other-belief is processed and directly interferes with the processing of the self-belief when the latter has to be prioritized at the time of belief computation. In addition, inter-individual differences in the belief task can be in part, but not fully, explained by inter-individual differences in the visual perspective task.