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Visual perspective taking is an essential skill for effective social interaction. Previous studies have tested various perceiver‐based factors that affect intentional perspective taking; however, the factors affecting spontaneous perspective taking remain unknown. To fill this gap, the present study used a novel spontaneous visual perspective taking paradigm to explore how an agent's race and emotion affect spontaneous level‐2 visual perspective taking. In Experiment 1, the participants completed a mental rotation task while a human agent simultaneously gazed at the target with positive, negative, or neutral facial expressions. The agent was African, Caucasian, or Chinese. The results revealed that the other‐race agents disrupted the participants' spontaneous level‐2 visual perspective taking, while emotion weakly affected it. Experiment 2 retested whether emotion could affect spontaneous level‐2 visual perspective taking while only own‐race agents were used. The participants completed the same task as that in Experiment 1. The results revealed that emotions weakly affected spontaneous level‐2 visual perspective taking. In summary, the present study first examined what target‐based factors affect spontaneous level‐2 visual perspective taking. The results extend the representation and incorporation of the close others' responses (RICOR) model. Specifically, people routinely construct representations of other people's points of view when they share the same racial group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes people spontaneously adopt the perspective of others? Previous work suggested that perspective taking can serve understanding the actions of others. Two studies corroborate and extend that interpretation. The first study varied cues to intentionality of eye gaze and action, and found that the more the actor was perceived as potentially interacting with the objects, the stronger the tendency to take his perspective. The second study investigated how manipulations of gaze affect the tendency to adopt the perspective of another reaching for an object. Eliminating gaze cues by blurring the actor's face did not reduce perspective-taking, suggesting that in the absence of gaze information, observers rely entirely on the action. Intriguingly, perspective-taking was higher when gaze and action did not signal the same intention, suggesting that in presence of ambiguous behavioral intention, people are more likely take the other's perspective to try to understand the action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]