Spontaneous perspective taking of an invisible person.

Observing the world from the perspective of others is one of the important foundational skills of social cognition. Visual perspective taking (VPT) is usually considered to have occurred when seeing another person. In researches on automatic VPT, a critical question is, does VPT occur merely based on another person's realistic perspective at the current moment, or does it also consider potential future perspectives? To examine the taking-a-potential-perspective assumption, the current study created a series of situations in which others are currently out of our sight (thus, extinguishing the information about the current perspective), with the possibility of returning and seeing a target from a different perspective than the participants, to test whether participants would spontaneously take the perspective of the temporarily invisible person.