When we study psychology, there is
a tendency to think about the tasks that we do as if there were built-in
modules in the brain dedicated to those tasks.
So, we talk about memory and assume that there is a particular thing in
the brain that helps us remember information.
We talk about attention, and figure there must be particular brain
systems that help us to pay attention.
As the science of psychology has
matured, it has become clear that there are many different systems that help us
with a variety of tasks. We now know,
for example, that there are many different kinds of memory. Some help us remember information over the
long-term and some help us to hold on to information for a few seconds or
minutes. Other memory systems allow us
to execute habits or to predict what is likely to happen next in a situation.
An interesting paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Rachel Ryskin,
Aaron Benjamin, Jonathan Tullis, and Sarah Brown-Schmidt examined perspective-taking as a task. Perspective-taking is the ability to take
someone else’s viewpoint into account when thinking.
For example, in a classic study,
Robert Krauss and his colleagues found that when people were asked to give
directions to a landmark in New York City, they changed the way they described
how to get to the landmark depending on whether the person asking was from the
city. For other city-dwellers, people
gave less specific instructions, because they assumed people would know basic
aspects of navigating the city like how to get uptown versus downtown.
These researchers examined whether
perspective taking was a single ability or a task that involves multiple
different systems. They examined this
question in an interesting way by looking at individual differences in
performance on different tasks that require perspective taking. If perspective taking is a single ability,
then people good at one task involving this ability should be good at other
tasks involving it as well.
They selected three tasks for
participants to perform across multiple sessions. In one task, participants saw a series of 80
words and were asked to generate cues that would remind them of those words in
two days. This task requires people to
take the perspective of themselves in a few days to figure out what would
remind them of the words they saw.
The second pair of tasks involved
conversations between two people seated at different computer screens in separate
rooms in which one person had to tell another which object on a 3 x 3 grid to
click on. On each grid, there was one
square that was covered, so a particular participant could not see behind it. Participants also knew which square was
blocked for the other participant, though they could see behind it. The image here shows examples of the
materials from the paper. One square is
always covered. The gray square is the
one in which the participant can see what is there, but knows the other
participant can’t see it.
With these grids, the person
speaking is shown one of the objects and is told that the other participant
should find that object on their grid. The
object they are supposed to talk about is circled. In this case, it is a banana. The key question is when do participants use
an adjective along with the name of the object to help the other
participant. In the situation on the
left, the participant has to use the adjective big to distinguish the big banana from the small one. On the right, there is no need to use an
adjective, because there is only one banana.
In the middle, though, there are two bananas, but only one is visible to
their partner. So from the speaker’s
perspective, they should call it a big banana, but if they recognize that their
partner can only see one banana, then they should not use an adjective.
Finally, participants hearing the
instructions have to search their grid to find the object. Participants in this study were connected to
an eye tracker so that it was possible to see what they were looking at as the
task progressed.
Suppose the speaker says, “Find
the big banana.” At the adjective (big), the participant could look at any
large object on the screen. When the
noun arrives (banana), participants could glance at any bananas in the
grid. The question is whether
participants will look at objects that they know the speaker cannot see,
because those objects are hidden from the speaker.
In addition to these three tasks,
participants did a number of other measures to help understand what factors
lead to good performance in perspective-taking tasks. They did the Stroop Task as a test of
executive function. In this task,
participants have to name the color of the font that words naming colors are
presented in. This task is particularly
difficult when the color of the font is a different color than the color named
by the word. For example, people are
slow when the word green is written
in a blue font. They also did tests of
working memory (the amount of information you can hold in mind at once when
doing a task) and long-term memory skill (the number of words from a list
people could remember).
On average, participants were
reasonably good at all tasks. They
remembered about half of the words from the list for which they generated cues
two days later. They tended to use
adjectives when they were needed and omit them when they were not
necessary. They found the object that
their partner was talking about, and looked less at objects that were hidden
from their partner than at other objects.
However, there were also substantial differences on these tasks across
participants.
Of interest, the correlations in
performance across all three the tasks were low. So, doing well in one perspective-taking did
not predict how well people would do on another task. The measure of executive function did not
predict individual differences in performance on any of the tasks that
well. Individual differences in working
memory predicted how well people would do in the memory task and also in the
task in which they were the speaker. In
addition, overall memory performance also predicted how well people would do on
the memory task in which people found cues for themselves. None of the measures predicted how well
people would do when finding objects that were labeled for them.
What does all of this mean?
The complex task of
perspective-taking seems to involve a number of different abilities. You have to figure out what information
someone else has access to (or what information you are likely to have in the
future) and then use that information to inform what you do on the task. It appears that this task recruits many
different abilities depending on the specific nature of the task you are
doing. So, even though we have a single
word for perspective-taking, psychologically it involves many different
abilities.
One ability that does seem to be
important for this task across at least a few situations is working
memory. That makes sense. If you are going to take another person’s
viewpoint into account, then you need to be able to keep in mind both what you
are doing as well as what the other person knows. The less information you can hold in mind at
one time, the less able you are to keep track of what other people know.
Finally, this study further
demonstrates how careful we have to be at figuring out the basic units of
thinking. There is a tendency to focus
on the tasks people perform and assume the brain is organized in a way that
respects these tasks. Studies like this
demonstrate that every task we perform involves a variety of different more
basic abilities that are brought together as needed.
One reason why this matters is
that when we do neuroimaging studies to look at brain activity when people are
doing a task, we often start to identify brain regions with the particular task
people were performing. As this study
demonstrates, though, a task like “perspective-taking” is not a single
thing. So, it would be dangerous to
conclude that there are particular brain regions that are associated with
perspective-taking, because that complex task involves lots of more specific
abilities.
