Why this matters becomes clear when we think about everyday learning, teamwork, and inclusion. If people create a visual-spatial snapshot of someone else’s field of view, that ability could shape how we predict others’ actions, communicate directions, or design environments that support diverse perspectives. The finding that self-centered representations also form, albeit more weakly, suggests our minds maintain multiple nested views during interaction. That layering could help explain how misunderstandings arise and how training might strengthen perspective-taking in classrooms, courts, or collaborative design.
Follow the link to explore the methods and datasets that produced these conclusions and consider how embodied visual representations might connect to growth and equity. The article opens a pathway from laboratory tasks to practical questions about empathy, accessibility, and teaching spatial skills. Learning whether and how we store another’s visual world has implications for technologies that aim to augment human potential and for practices that foster genuine inclusion.
Abstract
Social interactions often require the ability to “stand in others’ shoes” and perceive the world “through others’ eyes,” but it remains unclear the extent to which we can actually see others’ visual worlds. Prior research has primarily focused on mental-body transformation in visual-spatial perspective taking (VSPT), yet the subsequent visual processing under the adopted perspective has been less explored. Addressing this gap, our study investigated mental representation of the visual scene as a direct outcome of perceiving from another’s viewpoint. Using modified VSPT tasks, we paired avatar-perspective trials with self-perspective trials to create opportunities for observing priming effects resulting from potential mental representations formed under the avatar’s perspective. We hypothesized that if individuals form embodied representations of visual scenes while explicitly processing stimuli from the avatar’s viewpoint, these representations should be stored in memory, and elicit priming effects when later encountering similar scenes from their own perspective. Across four experiments, we provide the first evidence that (1) explicitly engaging in embodied VSPT produces robust mental representations of the visual scene from the adopted perspective, (2) these representations are visual-spatial rather than semantic in nature, and (3) these representations arise from embodied processing rather than from self-perspective strategies. Additionally, our findings reveal that individuals implicitly process visual stimuli from their own perspective during other-perspective tasks, forming distinct but weaker self-perspective representations. Overall, our findings demonstrate the existence of embodied representations in VSPT and offer significant insights into the processing mechanisms involved when we “stand in others’ shoes.”