The Dynamics of Perspective-taking

Perspective-taking as a nonlinear dynamical process, studied through the arm-movement trajectories that reveal egocentric and other-centric response choices.

This research explores how people represent and comprehend another’s perspective in social communication. This line of inquiry has contributed to many insights in the areas of pragmatics, embodiment, and social cognition. We are attempting to extend this research in two major ways. The first is to interpret perspective-taking behavior as a nonlinear dynamical process. Here we argue that the fundamental dynamical properties that exist throughout nature also exist at the level of high-level, human cognition. The second way is to use action dynamics techniques, as in capturing arm movement trajectories, to better understand the factors and cognitive processes that underlie egocentric and allocentric (“other-centric”) response choices.

Selected papers

  • Duran, N. D., Dale, R., & Kreuz, R. J. (2011). Listeners invest in an assumed other’s perspective despite cognitive cost. Cognition, 121, 22–40. [PDF]
  • Duran, N. D., & Dale, R. (2014). Perspective-taking in dialogue as self-organization under social constraints. New Ideas in Psychology, 32, 131–146. [PDF]
  • Duran, N. D., Dale, R., & Galati, A. (2016). Toward integrative dynamic models for adaptive perspective taking. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8, 761–779. [PDF]
  • Galati, A., Dale, R., & Duran, N. D. (2019). Social and configural effects on the cognitive dynamics of perspective-taking. Journal of Memory and Language, 104, 1–24. [PDF]
  • Duran, N. D., & Dale, R. (2011). Spatial cognition adapts to social context. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]

See the full list on the publications page.