Abstract:

Visual perspective taking indicates that people understand whether others can see an object or what they have seen. In visual perspective taking, people see things from others’ perspectives. Visual perspective taking is the foundation of cognitive development and also the starting point and premise of social interaction. However, ones’ information usually interferes with others’ perspectives. As a result, people who take others’ perspectives would use their perspectives to understand others. This will result in biases in visual perspective taking. These biases are usually induced by ones’ information, which is known as the egocentric bias. Egocentric bias plays an important role in unsuccessful social interaction. However, its inner mechanisms are still under debate. Specifically, the inhibitive selection model and fluency misattribution theory hold different statements on the emergence of the egocentric bias. The inhibitive selection model holds that when understanding others’ perspectives, participants need to inhibit their perspectives and deal with the conflicts between their perspectives and others’ perspectives. This inhibitive selection is related to the executive function, especially the inhibitory control. The fluency misattribution theory holds that when understanding others’ perspectives, people tend to erroneously attribute their perspectives to others’ perspectives, as their perspectives are more fluency in their minds. These two theories focus on different processes of visual perspective taking and then construct completely different theoretical approaches. The inhibitive selection model mainly focuses on the information inhibition process in the egocentric bias while ignores the information extraction and integration processes. On the contrary, the fluency misattribution theory focuses on the influence of extracting and integrating misinformation in the egocentric bias while ignores the influence of the information inhibition process. Therefore, this divergence in their theoretical approaches also suggests that the above-mentioned theories may not fully reveal the mechanisms of the egocentric bias. The present review will try to integrate the debates between the inhibitive selection model and fluency misattribution theory. Specifically, we first review the paradigms of the level-1 and level-2 visual perspective taking according to the processing level and complexity of visual perspective taking to examine the mechanisms of the egocentric bias. We found that the level-1 visual perspective taking is usually measured by the dot-probe paradigm. The level-2 visual perspective taking is usually measured by the own-body transformation task, director task, and ambiguous number paradigm. Then, we examine what factors may affect inhibitive selection and misattribution to find what factors may affect the egocentric bias. Furthermore, the inhibition-attribution collaboration model is proposed for the first time to bridge the gap between the inhibitive selection model and fluency misattribution theory. The inhibition-attribution collaboration model hypothesizes that the inhibitive selection model, which emphasizes the inhibitory process, and the fluency misattribution theory, which emphasizes the integration process, may not be mutually exclusive. These processes may jointly result in egocentric bias. Specifically, when taking others’ perspectives with high uncertainty, people have difficulty in inferring others’ views and perspectives correctly. In this case, the inhibitive selection model and fluency misattribution may result in egocentric bias through three processing pathways. Future studies should further test this model using the sophisticated paradigms on special groups of participants to explore how to improve social interaction by reducing egocentric bias.

Key words: egocentric bias, perspective taking, visual perspective taking, social interaction, interpersonal communication