Reading Your Mind While You Are Reading—Evidence for Spontaneous Visuospatial Perspective Taking During a Semantic Categorization Task

Recent studies have demonstrated people’s propensity to adopt others’ visuospatial perspectives (VSPs) in a shared physical context. The present study investigated whether spontaneous VSP taking occurs in mental space where another person’s perspective matters for mental activities rather than physical actions. Participants sat at a 90° angle to a confederate and performed a semantic categorization task on written words. From the participants’ point of view, words were always displayed vertically, while for the confederate, these words appeared either the right way up or upside down, depending on the confederate’s sitting position. Participants took longer to categorize words that were upside down for the confederate, suggesting that they adopted the confederate’s VSP without being prompted to do so. Importantly, the effect disappeared if the other’s visual access was impeded by opaque goggles. This demonstrates that human adults show a spontaneous sensitivity to others’ VSP in the context of mental activities, such as joint reading.