Towards a re-evaluation of egocentric behaviour in perspective-taking: the role of stimuli selection

This study re-evaluates egocentric behaviour in perspective-taking during referential communication, focusing on the role of stimulus selection. The debate centres on whether listeners prioritize their own perspective before considering the speaker's (late integration) or adopt the speaker's perspective from the outset (early integration). Previous early integration accounts have suggested that late integration findings might be due to the use of target expressions where hidden distractors—objects visible only to the listener—are better referential matches than the actual targets, though this claim lacked empirical testing. To investigate this, 33 neurotypical English-speaking adults participated in a questionnaire-based study. They were presented with ambiguous expressions and asked to indicate which object the speaker was likely referring to, choosing among "Target," "Hidden Distractor," or "Both equally likely," and rated their confidence levels. The items used were from prior studies by Keysar et al. (2003) and Hawkins et al. (2021). The results, analysed using chi-square tests, indicated that participants’ responses were not random but favoured specific interpretations for seven out of eight items, and their confidence in their options was over 80%. Listeners do not make errors because the target expression consistently favours the Hidden Distractor over the Target (cf. Brown-Schmidt & Hanna, 2011). These results highlight a more complex picture regarding the source of listeners’ errors. The study proposes a new classification of items in perspective-taking tasks along with its predictions and next steps for verifying whether this classification of items is causally related to listeners’ performance in perspective-taking tasks.