Abstract
Studies from perception and memory have shown that the difficulties that people encounter in responding to locations from imagined perspectives might be caused, at least in part, by sensorimotor conflicts during response computation and execution. That is, to reason about a spatial environment from an imagined perspective people must suppress automatically-activated information that specifies the locations of objects relative to their actual position. In the present study we examined whether overcoming such sensorimotor conflicts is greater when the observer is immersed in the spatial scene than being external to it.
In the task used, participants viewed in VR a round table with chairs placed around it at different positions. One of the chairs was highlighted in different color while a virtual character appeared sitting in another chair. Participants had to point to the location of the virtual character as if they were sitting in the highlighted chair. Participants carried out this task in one of three
conditions: (1) while standing next to the table in immserive virtual reality (2) while viewing the table on a virtual projection screen placed in front of them in the virtual environment, and (3) while viewing the table on a real projection screen in the lab. Results across the three conditions revealed that participants’ performance was best when the adopted imagined perspective was aligned with their actual facing orientation compared to all other orientations. However, the patterns of accuracy and
latency did not differ across conditions suggesting that immersion to the scene does not influence the degree of sensorimotor interference. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of competing theories of perspective taking.
