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Visuospatial transformations and personality: evidence of a relationship between visuospatial perspective taking and self-reported emotional empathy

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Abstract

In the visuospatial domain, perspective taking is the ability to imagine how a visual scene appears from an external observer’s viewpoint, and can be studied by asking subjects to encode object locations in a visual scene where another individual is present and then detecting their displacement when seeing the scene from the other’s viewpoint. In the current study, we explored the relationship between visuospatial perspective taking and self-report measures of the cognitive and emotional components of empathy in young adults. To this aim, we employed a priming paradigm, in which the presence of an avatar allowed to anticipate the next perceived perspective on the visual scene. We found that the emotional dimension of empathy was positively correlated with the behavioral advantage provided by the presence of the avatar, relative to unprimed perspective changes. These data suggest a link between the tendency to vicariously experience the others’ emotions and the ability to perform self–other spatial transformations.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical standard

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy

    Valentina Sulpizio, Emilia Metta & Gaspare Galati

  2. Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Sciences, University G. d’Annunzio, and ITAB, Institute for Advanced Biomedical Technologies, Chieti, Italy

    Giorgia Committeri

  3. Laboratory of Neuropsychology, Foundation Santa Lucia IRCCS, Rome, Italy

    Valentina Sulpizio & Gaspare Galati

  4. LPPA, Collège de France-CNRS, Paris, France

    Simon Lambrey & Alain Berthoz

  5. Service de Psychiatrie adulte, Groupe Hospitalier Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France

    Simon Lambrey

Authors
  1. Valentina Sulpizio
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  2. Giorgia Committeri
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  3. Emilia Metta
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  4. Simon Lambrey
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  5. Alain Berthoz
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  6. Gaspare Galati
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Valentina Sulpizio.

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Sulpizio, V., Committeri, G., Metta, E. et al. Visuospatial transformations and personality: evidence of a relationship between visuospatial perspective taking and self-reported emotional empathy. Exp Brain Res 233, 2091–2102 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4280-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4280-2

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