Automatic imitation is reduced in narcissists but only in egocentric perspective-takers.

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.

Does interference between self and other perspectives in theory of mind tasks reflect a common underlying process? Evidence from individual differences in theory of mind and inhibitory control.

Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to understand that other agents have different beliefs, desires, and knowledge than oneself, has been extensively researched. Theory of mind tasks involve participants dealing with interference between their self-perspective and another agent's perspective, and this interference has been related to executive function, particularly to inhibitory control. This study assessed whether there are individual differences in self-other interference, and whether these effects are due to individual differences in executive function.

Moral Judgments Depend on Information Presentation: Evidence for Recency and Transfer Effects.

Moral judgements are crucial for social life and rely on the analysis of the agent's intention and the outcome of the agent's action. The current study examines to the influence of how the information is presented on moral judgement. The first experiment investigated the effects of the order in which intention and outcome information was presented.

Assessing the integrity of the cognitive processes involved in belief reasoning by means of two nonverbal tasks: Rationale, normative data collection and illustration with brain-damaged patients.

Every day, we engage in social interactions with other people which require understanding their as well as our own mental states. Such capacity is commonly referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM). Disturbances of ToM are often reported in diverse pathologies which affect brain functioning and lead to problems in social interactions.

An objective neural signature of rapid perspective taking.

The frequency-tagging approach has generally been confined to study low-level sensory processes and always found related activation over the occipital region. Here for the first time, we investigated with it, high-level socio-cognitive functions, i.e.

The impact of sleep deprivation on visual perspective taking.

Total sleep deprivation (TSD) is known to alter cognitive processes. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to its impact on social cognition. Here, we investigated whether TSD alters levels-1 and -2 visual perspective-taking abilities, i.

Efficient belief tracking in adults: The role of task instruction, low-level associative processes and dispositional social functioning.

A growing body of evidence suggests that adults can monitor other people's beliefs in an efficient way. However, the nature and the limits of efficient belief tracking are still being debated. The present study addressed these issues by testing (a) whether adults spontaneously process other people's beliefs when overt task instructions assign priority to participants' own belief, (b) whether this processing relies on low-level associative processes and (c) whether the propensity to track other people's beliefs is linked to empathic disposition.

New Insights into the Inter-Individual Variability in Perspective Taking.

This study aimed to test whether individual differences in perspective taking could be explained with two underpinning cognitive dimensions: The ability to handle the conflict between our egocentric perspective and another person's perspective and the relative attentional focus during processing on the egocentric perspective versus another person's perspective. We conducted cluster analyses on 346 participants who completed a visual perspective-taking task assessing performance on these two cognitive dimensions. Individual differences were best reduced by forming four clusters, or profiles, of perspective-takers.

Cathodal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction Modulates the Use of Mitigating Circumstances during Moral Judgments.

Recently, a few transcranial magnetic stimulation or transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) studies have shown that the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) plays a causal role in moral reasoning especially in cases of accidental harms or attempted harms. The profile of results across studies is, however, not entirely consistent: sometimes the stimulation affects predominantly attempted harms while sometimes the stimulation affects predominantly accidental harms. We argue that such discrepancy could reflect different functional contributions of the rTPJ in moral judgments and that the chosen design parameters or stimulation method may differentially bring to light one or the other functional role of the rTPJ.

Impaired spontaneous belief inference following acquired damage to the left posterior temporoparietal junction.

Efficient social interactions require taking into account other people's mental states such as their beliefs, intentions or emotions. Recent studies have shown that in some social situations at least, we do spontaneously take into account others' mental states. The extent to which we have dedicated brain areas for such spontaneous perspective taking is however still unclear.

From gaze cueing to perspective taking: Revisiting the claim that we automatically compute where or what other people are looking at.

Two paradigms have shown that people automatically compute what or where another person is looking at. In the visual perspective-taking paradigm, participants judge how many objects they see; whereas, in the gaze cueing paradigm, participants identify a target. Unlike in the former task, in the latter task, the influence of what or where the other person is looking at is only observed when the other person is presented alone before the task-relevant objects.

Unintentional perspective-taking calculates whether something is seen, but not how it is seen.

A long established distinction exists in developmental psychology between young children's ability to judge whether objects are seen by another, known as "level-1" perspective-taking, and judging how the other sees those objects, known as "level-2" perspective-taking (Flavell, Everett, Croft, & Flavell, 1981a; Flavell, Flavell, Green, & Wilcox, 1981b). Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, and Bodley Scott (2010) provided evidence that there are two routes available to adults for level-1 perspective-taking: one which is triggered relatively automatically and the other requiring cognitive control. We tested whether both these routes were available for adults' level-2 perspective-taking.

Altercentric interference in level 1 visual perspective taking reflects the ascription of mental states, not submentalizing.

A growing body of work suggests that in some circumstances, humans may be capable of ascribing mental states to others in a way that is fast, cognitively efficient, and implicit (implicit mentalizing hypothesis). However, the interpretation of this work has recently been challenged by suggesting that the observed effects may reflect "submentalizing" effects of attention and memory, with no ascription of mental states (submentalizing hypothesis). The present study employed a strong test between these hypotheses by examining whether apparently automatic processing of another's visual perspective is influenced by experience-dependent beliefs about whether that person can see.

Failed Replication of Oxytocin Effects on Trust: The Envelope Task Case.

The neurohormone Oxytocin (OT) has been one of the most studied peptides in behavioral sciences over the past two decades. Many studies have suggested that OT could increase trusting behaviors. A previous study, based on the "Envelope Task" paradigm, where trust is assessed by the degree of openness of an envelope containing participant's confidential information, showed that OT increases trusting behavior and reported one of the most powerful effects of OT on a behavioral variable.

Theory of mind difficulties in patients with alcohol dependence: beyond the prefrontal cortex dysfunction hypothesis.

Background: Previous studies have shown that alcohol-dependent (AD) individuals have difficulties inferring other people's emotion, understanding humor, and detecting a faux pas. This study aimed at further understanding the nature of such "Theory of Mind" (ToM) difficulties.

Methods: A total of 34 recently detoxified AD and 34 paired controls were compared based on 2 nonverbal and video-based false belief tasks.

Can emotions influence level-1 visual perspective taking?

Emotions and perspective-taking are ubiquitous in our daily social interactions, but little is known about the relation between the two. This study examined whether and how emotions can influence even the most basic forms of perspective-taking. Experiment 1 showed that guilt made participants more other-centered in a simple visual perspective-taking task while anger tended to make them more self-centered.

Clarifying the role of theory of mind areas during visual perspective taking: Issues of spontaneity and domain-specificity.

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.

Self-perspective inhibition deficits cannot be explained by general executive control difficulties.

Understanding other people's point of view is crucial for successful social interaction but can be particularly challenging in situations where the other person's point view conflicts with our own view. Such situations require executive control processes that help us resist interference from our own perspective. In this study, we examined how domain-general these executive processes are.

The BCoS cognitive profile screen: Utility and predictive value for stroke.

Objective: We examined the utility of the Birmingham Cognitive Screen (BCoS) in discriminating cognitive profiles and recovery of function across stroke survivors. BCoS was designed for stroke-specific problems across 5 cognitive domains: (a) controlled and spatial attention, (b) language, (c) memory, (d) number processing, and (e) praxis.

Method: On the basis of specific inclusion criteria, this cross-section observational study analyzed cognitive profiles of 657 subacute stroke patients, 331 of them reassessed at 9 months.

Adults see vision to be more informative than it is.

Humans gain a wide range of knowledge through interacting with the environment. Each aspect of our perceptual experiences offers a unique source of information about the world-colours are seen, sounds heard and textures felt. Understanding how perceptual input provides a basis for knowledge is thus central to understanding one's own and others' epistemic states.

The use of embodied self-rotation for visual and spatial perspective-taking.

Previous research has shown that calculating if something is to someone's left or right involves a simulative process recruiting representations of our own body in imagining ourselves in the position of the other person (Kessler and Rutherford, 2010). We compared left and right judgements from another's spatial position (spatial perspective judgements) to judgements of how a numeral appeared from another's point of view (visual perspective judgements). Experiment 1 confirmed that these visual and spatial perspective judgements involved a process of rotation as they became more difficult with angular disparity between the self and other.

Extensive left temporal pole damage does not impact on theory of mind abilities.

The temporal poles (TPs) are among the brain regions that are often considered as the brain network sustaining our ability to understand other people's mental states or "Theory of Mind" (ToM). However, so far the functional role of the left and right TPs in ToM is still debated, and it is even not clear yet whether these regions are necessary for ToM. In this study, we tested whether the left TP is necessary for ToM by assessing the mentalizing abilities of a patient (C.

A database of psycholinguistic and lexical properties for French adjectives referring to human and/or nonhuman attributes.

The processing of human and nonhuman concepts (e.g., agreeable vs.

Similarities and differences in visual and spatial perspective-taking processes.

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).