title: Empathy and visual perspective-taking performance.
abstract: This study examined the extent to which visual perspective-taking performance is modulated by trait-level empathy. Participants completed a third-person visual perspective-taking task in which they judged the perspectives of two simultaneously presented avatars, designated "Self" and "Other." Depending on the trial, these avatars either held the same view (i.e., congruent) or a different view (i.e., incongruent). Analyses focused on the relationship between empathy and two perspective-taking phenomena: Selection between competing perspectives (i.e., perspective-congruence effects) and prioritization of the Self avatar's perspective. Empathy was related to improved overall performance on this task and a reduced cost of selecting between conflicting perspectives (i.e., smaller perspective-congruence effects). This effect was asymmetric, with empathy (i.e., empathic concern) levels predicting reduced interference from a conflicting perspective, especially when adopting the Self (vs. Other) avatar's perspective. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of the self-other distinction and mental flexibility components of empathy.
authors.affiliation: a School of Psychology , University of Birmingham , Birmingham , UK.
authors.forename: Bradley D
authors.initials: BD
authors.lastname: Mattan
authors.affiliation: a School of Psychology , University of Birmingham , Birmingham , UK.
authors.forename: Pia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rotshtein
authors.affiliation: a School of Psychology , University of Birmingham , Birmingham , UK.|b Department of Psychology , DePaul University , Chicago , USA.
authors.forename: Kimberly A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Quinn
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004645:Empathy / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012938:Social Perception; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Empathy; Personal relevance; Self-tagging; Visual perspective-taking