Former Eating Disorder Impairs 3rd Person but Not 1st Person Perspective Taking: Does Dance Training Help?

The mental ability to take the perspective of another person may depend on one's own bodily awareness and experience. In the present study, bodily awareness was defined as having a history of an eating disorder, and experience was defined as formal experience with dance. The study used a design in which reaction times in two mental perspective-taking tasks were compared between female dancers and non-dancers with and without a former eating disorder. Participants were asked to imagine two perspectives: (i) the position of front-facing and back-facing figures (3rd person perspective-taking task) and (ii) that these same figures are a self reflection in a mirror (1st person perspective-taking task). In both tasks, a particular hand was indicated in the presented figures, and the participants had to decide whether the hand represented their own left or right hand. Overall, responses were slower for front-facing than back-facing figures in the 3rd person perspective-taking task, and for back-facing than front-facing figures in the 1st person perspective-taking task. Importantly, having a former history of an eating disorder related to a decreased performance in the 3rd person perspective-taking task, but only in participants without dance experience. Results from an additional control group (a history of exercise but no dance experience) indicated that dance is particularly beneficial for mental bodily perspective taking. Dance experience, more so than exercise in general, can benefit 3rd person or extrapersonal perspective taking, supporting the favourable effect this exercise has on own-body processing.