Facilitatory effects of visual perspective taking level 2 for human and robotic avatars

Visual perspective taking (VPT) is a crucial component of social cognition: when engaging in activities such as preparing meals together, moving a couch together, playing tennis, and discussing our surroundings, the ability to keep track of what others see is essential. In recent years, studies investigated the cognitive mechanisms of VPT not only of other humans but also of artificial agents, such as robots. Thus far, researchers have primarily investigated interference tasks with regard to artificial agents (i.e., how the perspective of an agent interferes with one's own perspective). In the present study, we investigated a task where VPT has a facilitatory effect (i.e., taking the perspective of an agent results in a performance boost) across four experiments, in which we varied the type of the avatar: a human (Exp. 1), a humanoid robot with a human-like head (Exp. 2), a humanoid robot with a camera-like head (Exp. 3), and a camera (Exp. 4). We found significant VPT effects for the human and robot avatar but failed to do so for the robot with a camera-like head and the camera. These findings suggest that participants adopted the perspective of avatars that are either human or resemble a human-like appearance. However, this is not the case for avatars which deviate from a human-appearance or which imply a social presence.