Online level-2 perspective taking for newly learnt symbols

Humans demonstrate spontaneous sensitivity to other people’s perspective regarding object identities in online tasks (level-2 perspective taking, L2PT). Accumulating evidence shows that this includes representing perspective content rather than mere discrepancy in perspectives. However, evidence comes from studies using culturally grounded symbols as stimuli, leaving open the possibility that extensive, automatically accessible background knowledge on the target object is a precondition of the PT effect. Experiment 1 tested this by comparing L2PT across two groups: one performing a verification task on Arabic numbers, one on newly learnt symbol-label pairs. Half of the visual stimuli in both groups was symmetric, half asymmetric. In the joint condition, participants performed the task in parallel with their partner, observing stimuli from opposite viewing angles and thus had conflicting interpretations for asymmetric characters. Also performed the verification task individually, while their partner sat passively, with no visual access to the stimuli. We found a similar interference effect in the two groups. However, while the effect was stable in the number group, it diminished over time in the symbol group. Experiment 2ab demonstrated that the complexity of the recently learnt symbols has an impact on the process of spontaneous level-2 PT. The same procedure but with more complex symbols did not elicit any interference effect. Our findings demonstrate that online L2PT is not constrained to objects that participants have proficiency in identifying. Furthermore, our results indicate that spontaneous perspective-taking is affected by the complexity of the stimuli: diminishes when participants have to deal with complex symbols.