Dr Katrin Rothmaler | Altercentric and egocentric biases in adult object processing: how others modulate our perception and neural processing

As social beings, we strongly depend on the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others. An increasing amount of research suggests that we process the perspectives of other individuals even when they are completely irrelevant to us - in an implicit and perhaps automatic manner. This bias towards the perspective of another person has been referred to as ‘altercentric bias’. On the other hand, we can be biased by our own perception of the world when we deliberatly try to understand what other people think. That is, we have an 'egocentric bias'. Across three studies, we investigated the underlying neural mechanisms of these biases, the circumstances under which they occur, and how they relate to one another. In the first study, we use steady state visually evoked potentials (ssVEPs) and show that neural object processing is modulated by the perspective of an irrelevant bystander. In the second study, we show that adults exhibit an altercentric bias in a continuous object search paradigm, but do so only when the perspective of the other person has been highlighted by a previous task. Lastly, our third study provides evidence against automatic perspective processing when the perspective of another person needs to be inferred from self-experience. These results suggest that altercentric and egocentric biases may not be automatic processes as often suggested, but instead, depend on the context and saliency of the another person‘s perspective.

Poster