scholarly journals Perspective-Taking in Virtual Reality and Reduction of Biases against Minorities

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (8) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Vivian Hsueh Hua Chen ◽  
Sarah Hian May Chan ◽  
Yong Ching Tan

This study examines the effect of perspective-taking via embodiment in virtual reality (VR) in improving biases against minorities. It tests theoretical arguments about the affective and cognitive routes underlying perspective-taking and examines the moderating role of self-presence in VR through experiments. In Study 1, participants embodied an ethnic minority avatar and experienced workplace microaggression from a first-person perspective in VR. They were randomly assigned to affective (focus on emotions) vs. cognitive (focus on thoughts) perspective-taking conditions. Results showed that ingroup bias improved comparably across both conditions and that this effect was driven by more negative perceptions of the majority instead of more positive perceptions of minorities. In Study 2, participants experienced the same VR scenario from the third-person perspective. Results replicated those from Study 1 and extended them by showing that the effect of condition on ingroup bias was moderated by self-presence. At high self-presence, participants in the affective condition reported higher ingroup bias than those in the cognitive condition. The study showed that in VR, the embodiment of an ethnic minority is somewhat effective in improving perceptions towards minority groups. It is difficult to clearly distinguish between the effect of affective and cognitive routes underlying the process of perspective-taking.

Author(s):  
Giovanni Stanghellini

This chapter describes the process of progressive decentring of two partners taking part in a dialogue. Phenomenological unfolding is the taking of a third-person perspective on one’s own experiences. The hermeneutic moment consists in position-taking and perspective-taking with respect to one’s own experiences and their meanings. It requires the capacity to distance oneself from one’s own habits in interpreting and understanding the ‘facts’ of one’s own life, and to make of these very habits the object for reflection and for understanding. The psychodynamic moment consists in positing both phenomenological unfolding and hermeneutic analysis in a larger historical context, according great importance to the role of life events, of tradition and prejudice in the development of any form of habitus in interpreting one’s experiences, and of limit-situations in jeopardizing one’s defensive ‘housings’ and showing their vulnerability. This means acknowledging and accepting contingency as the necessity of one’s own story.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahba Besharati ◽  
Paul Jenkinson ◽  
Michael Kopelman ◽  
Mark Solms ◽  
Valentina Moro ◽  
...  

In recent decades, the research traditions of (first-person) embodied cognition and of (third-person) social cognition have approached the study of self-awareness with relative independence. However, neurological disorders of self-awareness offer a unifying perspective to empirically investigate the contribution of embodiment and social cognition to self-awareness. This study focused on a neuropsychological disorder of bodily self-awareness following right-hemisphere damage, namely anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP). A previous neuropsychological study has shown AHP patients, relative to neurological controls, to have a specific deficit in third-person, allocentric inferences in a story-based, mentalisation task. However, no study has tested directly whether verbal awareness of motor deficits is influenced by either perspective-taking or centrism, and if these deficits in social cognition are correlated with damage to anatomical areas previously linked to mentalising, including the supramarginal and superior temporal gyri and related limbic white matter connections. Accordingly, two novel experiments were conducted with right-hemisphere stroke patients with (n = 17) and without AHP (n = 17) that targeted either their own (egocentric, experiment 1) or another stooge patient’s (experiment 2) motor abilities from a first-or-third person (allocentric in Experiment 2) perspective. In both experiments, neurological controls showed no significant difference between perspectives, suggesting that perspective-taking deficits are not a general consequence of right-hemisphere damage. More specifically, experiment 1 found AHP patients were more aware of their own motor paralysis when asked from a third compared to a first-person perspective, using both group level and individual level analysis. In experiment 2, AHP patients were less accurate than controls in making allocentric, third-person perspective judgements about the stooge patient, but with only a trend towards significance and with no within-group, difference between perspectives. Deficits in egocentric and allocentric third-person perspective taking were associated with lesions in the middle frontal gyrus, superior temporal and supramarginal gyri, with white matter disconnections more predominate in deficits in allocentricity. This study confirms previous clinical and empirical investigations on the selectivity of first-person motor awareness deficits in anosognosia for hemiplegia and experimentally demonstrates for the first time that verbal egocentric 3PP-taking can positively influence 1PP body awareness.


2021 ◽  
pp. 40-79
Author(s):  
Hilary Kornblith

Knowledge may be examined from the third-person perspective, as psychologists and sociologists do, or it may be examined from the first-person perspective, as each of us does when we reflect on what we ought to believe. This chapter takes the third-person perspective. One obvious source of knowledge is perception, and some general features of how our perceptual systems are able to pick up information about the world around us are highlighted. The role of the study of visual illusions in this research is an important focus of the chapter. Our ability to draw out the consequences of things we know by way of inference is another important source of knowledge, and some general features of how inference achieves its successes are discussed. Structural similarities between the ways in which perception works and the ways in which inference works are highlighted.


10.2196/18888 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. e18888
Author(s):  
Susanne M van der Veen ◽  
Alexander Stamenkovic ◽  
Megan E Applegate ◽  
Samuel T Leitkam ◽  
Christopher R France ◽  
...  

Background Visual representation of oneself is likely to affect movement patterns. Prior work in virtual dodgeball showed greater excursion of the ankles, knees, hips, spine, and shoulder occurs when presented in the first-person perspective compared to the third-person perspective. However, the mode of presentation differed between the two conditions such that a head-mounted display was used to present the avatar in the first-person perspective, but a 3D television (3DTV) display was used to present the avatar in the third-person. Thus, it is unknown whether changes in joint excursions are driven by the visual display (head-mounted display versus 3DTV) or avatar perspective during virtual gameplay. Objective This study aimed to determine the influence of avatar perspective on joint excursion in healthy individuals playing virtual dodgeball using a head-mounted display. Methods Participants (n=29, 15 male, 14 female) performed full-body movements to intercept launched virtual targets presented in a game of virtual dodgeball using a head-mounted display. Two avatar perspectives were compared during each session of gameplay. A first-person perspective was created by placing the center of the displayed content at the bridge of the participant’s nose, while a third-person perspective was created by placing the camera view at the participant’s eye level but set 1 m behind the participant avatar. During gameplay, virtual dodgeballs were launched at a consistent velocity of 30 m/s to one of nine locations determined by a combination of three different intended impact heights and three different directions (left, center, or right) based on subject anthropometrics. Joint kinematics and angular excursions of the ankles, knees, hips, lumbar spine, elbows, and shoulders were assessed. Results The change in joint excursions from initial posture to the interception of the virtual dodgeball were averaged across trials. Separate repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed greater excursions of the ankle (P=.010), knee (P=.001), hip (P=.0014), spine (P=.001), and shoulder (P=.001) joints while playing virtual dodgeball in the first versus third-person perspective. Aligning with the expectations, there was a significant effect of impact height on joint excursions. Conclusions As clinicians develop treatment strategies in virtual reality to shape motion in orthopedic populations, it is important to be aware that changes in avatar perspective can significantly influence motor behavior. These data are important for the development of virtual reality assessment and treatment tools that are becoming increasingly practical for home and clinic-based rehabilitation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 528-538
Author(s):  
Hye Yoon Park ◽  
Kyoungri Park ◽  
Eunchong Seo ◽  
Se Jun Koo ◽  
Minji Bang ◽  
...  

Objective: Defects in self-referential processing and perspective-taking are core characteristics that may underlie psychotic symptoms and impaired social cognition in schizophrenia. Here, we investigated the neural correlates of self-referential processing regardless of the perspective taken and third-person perspective-taking regardless of the target person to judge relevance in individuals at ultra-high risk for psychosis. We also explored relationships between alterations in neural activity and neurocognitive function and basic self (‘ ipseity’) disorder. Methods: Twenty-two ultra-high-risk individuals and 28 healthy controls completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging task. While being scanned, participants were asked to take a first-person perspective or to put themselves in their close relative’s place thereby adopting a third-person perspective during judgments of the relevance of personality trait adjectives to one’s self and a close relative. Results: For self-referential (vs other-referential) processing, ultra-high-risk individuals showed less neural activity in the left ventromedial prefrontal cortex/medial orbitofrontal cortex, which was correlated with poor working memory performance. When taking a third-person perspective (vs first-person perspective), ultra-high-risk individuals showed more activity in the middle occipital gyrus. Conclusion: Taken together, our findings suggest that ultra-high-risk individuals already show aberrant neural activity during self-referential processing which may possibly be related to engagement of working memory resources.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Gonzalez-Liencres ◽  
Luis E. Zapata ◽  
Guillermo Iruretagoyena ◽  
Sofia Seinfeld ◽  
Lorena Perez-Mendez ◽  
...  

2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 1100-1117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Mattan ◽  
Kimberly A. Quinn ◽  
Ian A. Apperly ◽  
Jie Sui ◽  
Pia Rotshtein

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