Do You See What I See (DYSWIS)? Understanding individual differences in spontaneous spatial perspective-taking

Spatial perspective-taking (sPT) contributes to social interactions, allowing individuals to imagine how a scene might appear to others. Traditionally, sPT has been investigated as the ability to take the perspective of others when explicitly instructed to do so. However, more recent findings suggest that, even in the absence of explicit instruction, as in most real-life settings, individuals sometimes take the spatial perspective of others, that is, they engage in spontaneous sPT. To explain why, research has so far focused on context-related features of the visual scene. Here, we focus on individual differences between observers, and how both contextual and person-related factors modulate spontaneous sPT. By developing a novel task, the Do You See What I See (DYSWIS) task, across four studies (N = 603; age range: 18-36 years), we find that some individuals are systematically more likely than others to choose the perspective of others, across different conditions and when tested 2 weeks apart. These individual differences in spontaneous sPT positively correlate with self-reported empathy (in three of four studies) and with sPT ability (only when considering the egocentric interference index) but not with mental rotation or nonverbal reasoning abilities. These associations are also stable across context-related conditions that increase spontaneous sPT, such as the presence of humans or their implied movement. From a theoretical perspective, these results suggest that individual differences in spontaneous sPT might not only be a matter of ability but also a matter of choice, justifying the study of spontaneous sPT as partly independent construct.