Human beings have a remarkable
capacity to project themselves into space.
Think about playing a video game.
Even though you and your physical body are sitting in a chair some distance
from the screen, you can put yourself into the place of the avatar you have on
the screen.
In first-person games, that is
pretty easy to do, because the view you get on the screen is the view from your
eyes. But, in third-person games, you
are watching your character move in an environment. Yet, you can quickly adapt your perspective
to be focused on the location of your character on the screen.
Indeed, a study I did in
collaboration with Miguel Brendl that was published in Psychological
Science in 2005 showed how
easy it is for people to take this kind of outside perspective.
Previous research suggests that
people like to pull positive things toward themselves and to push negative
things away. The question in this study
is where the ‘self’ is located.
Participants sat at a computer
screen and saw a corridor receding in depth.
Their name was placed in the middle of that corridor. Participants were holding a lever that they
could pull toward themselves or push away from themselves.
Names of objects would appear on the
screen. Some of the objects were things
most people think are positive (like flowers), while others were objects most
people think of as negative (like spider).
On some blocks of trials, participants were told to move positive
objects toward their name and on other blocks, they were told to move positive
objects away from their name.
When the objects are far away in
the corridor beyond where the participant’s name is, then the movements
relative to the name and to the body are the same. That is, pulling the object toward the name
also pulls it toward the body and pushing it away from the name also pushes it
away from the body. In this case, it
should be no surprise that people were faster to pull the lever when the word
was positive and faster to push the lever when the word was negative.
The important condition was when
the object was near to the participant in the corridor. In this case, the object was in between the
person’s physical body and their representation on the screen. Now, if they pushed the lever, they were
moving the object toward their name (which was their representation on the
screen), but away from their physical body.
Likewise, if they pulled the lever, they were moving the object away
from their name, but toward their physical body.
In this case, participants were
faster to push positive objects toward their name (but away from their body),
but faster to pull negative objects away from their name (but toward their
physical body).
This set of findings suggests that
people are good at locating themselves at a point in space that is outside of
their physical body.
But, an interesting study in the
November, 2015 issue of Psychological Science by Elisa
Ferre, Christophe Lopez, and Patrick Haggard suggests that the self is anchored
into the body by the vestibular system. The
vestibular system is a mechanism in the inner ear that helps people maintain
balance by recognizing where the body is relative to gravity. The vestibular system is the one that you
disrupt when you spin around in a circle several times.
The idea is that activating the
vestibular system reminds the brain of where the body is located physically in
space and causes representations of what is happening in the world to be
interpreted based on the location of the body.
To explore this possibility,
researchers used electrodes to gently activate the vestibular system. When electrodes are placed near the ear, it
is possible to deliver an electrical pulse that engages this system. As a control condition, some other blocks in
the study were done with the electrodes placed lower down on the neck where
they do not engage the vestibular system.
The participant sat in a chair
with their eyes closed and an experimenter sat in front of them. While the stimulation was going on, the
experimenter traced a letter on the participant’s forehead with a Q-tip. The experimenter wrote the letter b, d, p, or
q, and the participant had to say which letter they felt.
Notice, these letters are
ambiguous. Suppose the experimenter
wrote the letter b. If the participant
is able to take the experimenter’s perspective, then the participant should
respond that they felt a letter b being written. But, if the participant takes their own perspective,
then they should say that they felt a letter d being written.
When the vestibular system was
being activated by the electrodes, participants were much more likely to take
their own perspective on the letter than the experimenter’s perspective compared
to the control stimulation on their neck.
This finding suggests that
engaging the vestibular system brings people’s perspective back into their
physical body rather than allowing them to take someone else’s perspective.
This is interesting, but does it
really matter?
There are many situations in which
it is valuable for us to be able to take an outside perspective on what is
happening in the world. Clearly, we do
this with video games. But, we make
predictions about what people and objects in the world are going to do all the
time. This ability also helps us to
give other people directions when they are trying to get somewhere.
These results suggest that the
more aware we are of our own physical bodies, the harder it is to take this
outside perspective. So, if we are going
to be engaging in an activity where we need to take another person’s
point-of-view, it would be useful to minimize the factors that remind us of our
own physical body.
