Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Spatial perspective-taking is an ability to understand in which direction an object is located relative to an agent (e.g.,another person or a chair). Previous studies showed that left/right judgments prompted an egocentric transformation strategy(i.e., mental rotation of the self) whereas front/behind judgments prompted other strategies (e.g., tracing a line of sight). Toexamine whether the symmetrical shape of an agent could affect the choice of strategies, we used as an agent a cuboid whichhas a prong on one of its sides. We labeled the prong side as the front (Experiment 1) or right (Experiment 2) of the agent,about which participants made left/right and front/behind judgments. The results revealed that egocentric transformations weremore favored for judgments about directions along symmetrical than asymmetrical axes of the agent, regardless of whether thejudgment was about left/right or front/behind. This suggests similar processing underlies left/right and front/behind judgments.