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Thinking about how other people represent objects in the world around them is thought to require deliberate effort. In recent years, interactive "joint action" paradigms have shown how social context can affect our cognitive processing. We tested whether people would represent their partner's point of view in a simple team game. Participants played a game in which they had to judge the magnitude of a number either sat alone, or opposite a partner. Importantly they were never asked to judge their partner's point of view. Remarkably, when playing the game as a team, people were better when their partner happened to share their view of the number, such as when seeing a number 8, than when their partner viewed the number to be different, such as when seeing a number 6 that looked like a number 9 to their partner. In two further experiments, we identified the conditions under which the effect was present. Experiment two showed that the effect was only present after observing the prior involvement of one's partner in the task. Experiment 3, showed that the aspect of the stimulus (its magnitude) that participants were sensitive to did not need to be the aspect of the stimulus to which their partner was paying attention.

Narcissism is a prevalent personality trait associated with low concern for others and high self-focus. Congruently, reduced automatic imitation in narcissists was reported in one study (23 participants), but it was not replicated in another (57 participants). In this study, 100 participants completed the previously used narcissism and automatic imitation measures but here along with a visual perspective-taking task allowing to dissociate 4 profiles of perspective-takers. While we confirmed a non-replication at whole-sample level, we did find a reliable negative association between narcissism and automatic imitation among egocentric perspective-takers, that is, characterized as highly self-centered when tasked to adopt someone else's point of view. Our findings shed a new light on whether narcissistic individuals are less sensitive to others, highlight the importance of considering performance-based individual differences within the narcissistic personality, and revisit the recent claim that automatic imitation poorly relates to social functioning by presenting a theoretical framework that questions the sensitivity of the automatic imitation task.

Visual perspective taking is a fundamental feature of the human social brain. Previous research has mainly focused on explicit visual perspective taking and contrasted brain activation for other- versus self-perspective judgements. This produced a conceptual gap to theory of mind studies, where researchers mainly compared activation for taking another's mental perspective to non-mental control conditions. We compared brain activation for visual perspective taking to activation for non-mental control conditions where the avatar was replaced by directional (arrow, lamp) or non-directional (brick-wall) objects. We found domain-specific activation linked to the avatar's visual perspective in right TPJ, ventral mPFC and ventral precuneus. Interestingly, we found that these areas are spontaneously processing information linked to the other's perspective during self-perspective judgements. Based on a review of the visual perspective taking literature, we discuss how these findings can explain some of the inconsistent/negative results found in previous studies comparing other- versus self-perspective judgements.

Processes for perspective-taking can be differentiated on whether or not they require us to mentally rotate ourselves into the position of the other person (Michelon & Zacks, 2006). Until now, only two perspective-taking tasks have been differentiated in this way, showing that judging whether something is to someone’s left or right does require mental rotation, but judging if someone can see something or not does not. These tasks differ firstly on whether the content of the perspective is visual or spatial and secondly on whether the type of the judgement is early-developing (level-1 type) or later-developing (level-2 type). Across two experiments, we tested which of these factors was likely to be most important by using four different perspective-taking tasks which crossed orthogonally the content of judgement (visual vs. spatial) and the type of judgement (level-1 type vs. level-2 type). We found that the level-2 type judgements, of how something looks to someone else and whether it is to their left or right, required egocentric mental rotation. On the other hand, level-1 type judgements, of whether something was in front of or behind someone and of whether someone could see something or not, did not involve mental rotation. We suggest from this that the initial processing strategies employed for perspective-taking are largely independent of whether judgements are visual or spatial in nature. Furthermore, early developing abilities have features that make mental rotation unnecessary.

In the paper a modification of a Socio-cognitive Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm, recently proposed by the authors, is presented. This modification consists in devising a mechanism for dynamic adaptation of the population structure of the swarm. Besides the design and rationale for the approach, referring to the state-of-the-art PSO original algorithm and several of its modifications, experimental results tackling popular benchmark functions are presented and discussed in detail., SCOPUS: cp.p, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Previous research suggests that perspective-taking and other "theory of mind" processes may be cognitively demanding for adult participants, and may be disrupted by concurrent performance of a secondary task. In the current study, a Level-1 visual perspective task was administered to 32 adults using a dual-task paradigm in which the secondary task tapped executive function. Results suggested that the secondary task did not affect the calculation of perspective, but did affect the selection of the relevant (Self or Other) perspective for a given trial. This is the first direct evidence of a cognitively efficient process for "theory of mind" in adults that operates independently of executive function. The contrast between this and previous findings points to a distinction between simple perspective-taking and the more complex and cognitively demanding abilities more typically examined in studies of "theory of mind". It is suggested that these findings may provide a parsimonious explanation of the success of infants on 'indirect' measures of perspective-taking that do not explicitly require selection of the relevant perspective.

Much of what we know about other people's beliefs comes non-inferentially from what people tell us. Developmental research suggests that 3-year-olds have difficulty processing such information: they suffer interference from their own knowledge of reality when told about someone's false belief (e.g., [Wellman, H. M., & Bartsch, K. (1988). Young children's reasoning about beliefs. Cognition, 30, 239-277.]). The current studies examined for the first time whether similar interference occurs in adult participants. In two experiments participants read sentences describing the real colour of an object and a man's false belief about the colour of the object, then judged the accuracy of a picture probe depicting either reality or the man's belief. Processing costs for picture probes depicting reality were consistently greater in this false belief condition than in a matched control condition in which the sentences described the real colour of one object and a man's unrelated belief about the colour of another object. A similar pattern was observed for picture probes depicting the man's belief in most cases. Processing costs were not sensitive to the time available for encoding the information presented in the sentences: costs were observed when participants read the sentences at their own pace (Experiment 1) or at a faster or a slower pace (Experiment 2). This suggests that adults' difficulty was not with encoding information about reality and a conflicting false belief, but with holding this information in mind and using it to inform a subsequent judgement. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We present an application of Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) to simulate socio-cognitive features of a population. We incorporated perspective taking ability to generate three different proportions of ant colonies: Control Sample, High Altercentricity Sample, and Low Alter-centricity Sample. We simulated their performances on the Travelling Salesman Problem and compared them with the classic ACO. Results show that all three ‘cognitively enabled’ ant colonies require less time than the classic ACO. Also, though the best solution is found by the classic ACO, the Control Sample finds almost as good a solution but much faster. This study is offered as an example to illustrate an easy way of defining inter-individual interactions based on stigmergic features of the environment.

We describe the performance of a brain-damaged subject who suffered from visual agnosia leading to major difficulties in generating and exploiting visual representations from long-term memory. His performance in a physical judgement task in which he was required to answer questions about the visual shapes of Arabic numerals reflected his agnosic problems. However, he showed no impairment in usual number processing and calculation tasks. This case shows that, despite some commonalities in number and object processing, actual numerical processes are not affected by visual agnosia and can be preserved even when fine visual processes are impaired.