Humans are inherently social beings that benefit from their perceptional capability to embody another point of view, typically referred to as perspective taking. Perspective taking is an essential feature in our daily interactions and is pivotal for human development. However, much remains unknown about the precise mechanisms that underlie perspective taking. Here, we show that formalizing perspective taking in a computational model can detail the embodied mechanisms employed by humans in perspective taking. The model’s main building block is a set of action primitives that are passed through a forward model. The model employs a process that selects a subset of action primitives to be passed through the forward model to reduce the response time. The model demonstrates the results that mimic those captured by human data, including response times differences caused by the angular disparity between the perspective-taker and the other agent, the impact of task-irrelevant body posture variations in perspective taking, and differences in the perspective taking strategy between individuals. Our results provide support for the hypothesis that perspective taking is a mental simulation of the physical movements that are required to match another person’s visual viewpoint. Furthermore, the model provides several testable predictions, including the prediction that forced early responses lead to an egocentric bias and that a selection process introduces dependencies between two consecutive trials. Our results indicate potential links between perspective taking and other essential perceptional and cognitive mechanisms, such as active vision and autobiographical memories.

中文翻译：

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具身视觉视角的计算建模

人类本质上是社会人，他们受益于他们体现另一种观点的感知能力，通常被称为观点采择。透视是我们日常互动的基本特征，对人类发展至关重要。然而，关于观点采择背后的确切机制仍有很多未知。在这里，我们展示了在计算模型中形式化透视可以详细说明人类在透视中采用的具体机制。该模型的主要构建块是一组通过前向模型传递的动作原语。该模型采用了一个过程，该过程选择要通过前向模型传递的动作原语子集以减少响应时间。该模型展示了模拟人类数据捕获的结果，包括由视角接受者和其他智能体之间的角度差异引起的响应时间差异，与任务无关的身体姿势变化对视角采集的影响，以及个体之间视角采集策略的差异。我们的结果支持这样一种假设，即视角是对与另一个人的视觉观点相匹配所需的身体运动的心理模拟。此外，该模型提供了几个可测试的预测，包括强迫早期反应导致以自我为中心的偏见的预测，以及选择过程在两个连续试验之间引入依赖性的预测。我们的结果表明观点采择与其他基本感知和认知机制之间的潜在联系，例如主动视觉和自传体记忆。