Dear Jimmy.

Your main question has to do with a truly a default predisposition toward either egocentric or allocentric reference frame use among individuals. Certainly you have already heard of cognitive styles, namely those designated as field dependence or field independence. As I see it, an egocentric reference frame is to field independence, as an allocentric reference frame is to field dependence. There is accumulating evidence that shows that these cognitive styles are induced by task demands but are also a reflection of some hard-wired, genetically determined spatial behavior. In what follows I elaborate a title on the two cognitive styles mentioned above and how to assess them through a well-known test by all psychologists 

Field dependence is a concept in the domain of cognitive styles. The concept was coined by American psychologist Herman Witkin in 1962. Field dependence or independence was the earliest studied area in the study of cognitive styles.

In general, people who exhibit field dependence tend to rely on information provided by the outer world, the field or frame of a situation and their cognition (toward other things) is based on this overall field.

Field dependence or independence is indicated, for example, by the Tilting Rod and Frame Test. The tilt of the frame or room provided a field and the degree of independence from it was shown by the accuracy with which the subject had the experimenter adjust the rod. As mentioned, their interpretation and the concept of field dependence/independence was initially presented by Witkin and his group in his book Personality Through Perception. As its title suggests, other tests were studied and reported on. A field dependence/independence factor was reported in his later book, Psychological Differentiation.

Later, Witkin and his group developed an Embedded Figure Test and did more work with human development. The EFT figured prominently in Psychological Differentiation. Differentiation was shown by an ability to trace a figure "embedded" within a more complex figure. Field-independent people were generally more differentiated, but differentiation was a broader concept than field dependency.

Witkin's group participated in developing their concepts and were given coauthor credit in their two books. The group included the psychoanalyst HelenLewis, the psychologist Hanna Fatterson, and the experimental psychologist Don Goodenough.

More independently, Witkin wrote a Journal of Abnormal Psychology review of relationships between Field Dependency/Psychological Differentiation and types of psychopathology. For example, field-independent people appeared to be more likely to develop delusions while field-dependent people were more likely to have scattered hallucinations.

Educational Testing Service (ETS) produced a Group Embedded Figures Test, suited for testing a classroom of students. It correlated with the EFT to an extent, but was not exactly the same in some correlations. After his work on the books and review, Witkin went to ETS and published some ETS reviews of the thousands of studies related to Field Dependency/Psychological Differentiation.

A rating scale was developed for the Draw a Person Test by Witkin's clinicians, described in Psychological Differentiation, and was widely used as another measure of psychological differentiation. In it, greater psychological differentiation was shown by more sophisticated detail, demonstrating more specific identity.

Less differentiated people were usually also more field-dependent and were more inclined to use what Witkin's clinicians in Psychological Differentiation called "massive global repression." Since his experienced clinicians could also recognize field dependence and lack of psychological differentiation upon meeting subjects, however, their conclusion about subjects' use of repression was open to possible contamination.

Their repression hypothesis was more objectively supported for group extremes by studies of "perceptual defense"—the tendency to recognize emotionally significant, disturbing words less easily than more neutral words. Such "defense" had been shown by numerous studies to be correlated with a tendency to repress as shown by measures such as the MMPI.

Those average in Differentiation/Field Independence had been given little specific attention since it was assumed they would simply be intermediate in repression.

In their perceptual defense, however, they were not intermediate. People who were average (statistically "normal") were more able to recognize words if they were emotionally significant. That was defended as making more sense in evolutionary/survival terms. It seems reasonable to suppose that average ("normal") subjects can confuse the results of a study that includes them without recognizing their particular contribution.

Rod and Frame Test (RFT)

To be more specific, in the RFT, examinees are required to sit in a completely dark room without reflecting surfaces where a 3.5 foot luminous square frame with one inch wide sides contains a rod much like one of the sides. The test is properly given after brief (120-second) dark adaptation and the large glowing RFT is seven feet from the subject so it is a dramatic visual display filling much of the visual field. If the test is given with insufficient dark adaptation, many subjects will see the luminous stimulus disappear or fragment when they fixate it visually and a large proportion of them will not happen to report that. The test's validity then is not known.

The RFT is presented with the tilt of rod and tilt of frame in every possible order (RR, LL, RL, LR). The examinee is then asked to tell the examiner how to adjust the rod to "straight up and down like the flagpole outside." Scores are based the number of degrees away from 90.

Check this out:

Developmental vision determines the reference frame for the multisensory control of action Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Mar 13; 104(11): 4753–4758. 

Dear Orlando,

I know all the visuospatial tasks you mentioned, and I thank you for giving a lengthy account of their history and functions. I am cognizant of the accumulating body of evidence, from both behavioral and neuroimaging studies, which shows that there are individual differences in perspective-taking and the preference for or proclivity toward one type of reference frame over another type. However, this begs the question of how "switching" or translations between such reference frames during spatial processing occur [Note: I understand that research on this is still ongoing.] My previous work and many other related works have shown that you cannot rely solely on your preferred reference frame or perspective for spatial learning and representation. So there has to be moments in time in which both types of reference frames (allocentric and egocentric) are "used" in unison. My chief concern pertains to getting to the crux of reference frame use. What is the fundamental picture of reference frame (or perspective) preference or use? At the functional or behavioral level, it certainly appears that distinct preferences apply to different individuals. However, if such distinct preferences emerge from a state of mind that is beyond awareness, a state in which both allocentric and egocentric information are being processed in parallel, won't you say that there is actually no inherent (or genetically determined) predisposition toward the use of either type of reference frame? Presupposing that there is some potential for this conjecture to be realized, would it (or would it not) be far-fetched to say that the preference for one reference frame over another, as inferred from experimental testing based on specific tasks, is actually induced by the demands or characteristics of the task(s)-at-hand, and not a good reflection of the actual mechanisms of reference frame use, which may occur at a preliminary subconscious level. If this is indeed the case, then my argument is that any evidence implicating a distinct preference for one reference frame over another cannot serve as a good representation of the mechanisms/processes that engendered this preference (and thus any talk of distinct reference frame use may, once you arrive at the crux of things, be an illusion or epiphenomenon). These mechanisms may emerge from a fundamental, meta-aware or subconscious mental state in which both egocentric and allocentric reference frames are engaged, and whereby the spatial information they "captured" are processed in parallel.

JZ

Dear Jimmy:

Thank you very much for your message and the additional information you provide me with and related to your question regarding egocentric or allocentric reference frame use among individuals. I am aware that there are individual differences in perspective-taking and the preference for, or proclivity toward, one type of reference frame over another type. How does one explain the existence of individual differences in perspective-taking? As I see it, such differences have mainly to do with individuals' capacity for decentration, as Piaget used to say. The more dimensions, perspectives, and the like, an individual is able to take into account, the more s/he is likely of perspective taking and realizing that s/he is not the center of, say, everything. Of course, perspective taking is at odds with egocentrism or one's proclivity towards centration or one's and inability to put, for example, on another's shoes. Characteristics of the task at hand, cognitive abilities,  as well as biological predispositions might be invoked to explain such individual differences. Note also that there is accumulating evidence that perspective-taking is a developmental phenomenon. Piaget's findings, for example, clearly show that older children  are more capable of perspective-taking and decentration than their younger counterparts. There are also levels of perspective taking, namely social perspective taking. Psychologist Robert Selman (1980), for instance, formalized 5 levels of social perspective stages, whose description is beyond the scope of this answer. To an extent, Piaget's cognitive stages also represent different levels of perspective-taking in the cognitive domain.

I agree with you on the idea that there are moments in time in which both types of reference frames (allocentric and egocentric) are "used" in unison. This finding is consistent with another finding in the pro-social domain that at times we act pro-socially towards some individuals and anti-socially towards other ones.

One of your topics in your question is egocentrism. Egocentrism, however, is not a unitary concept. Piaget, for example, speak of egocentrism in each of his cognitive stages. Adolescents' belief that there are no limits for their formal thinking -- which Piaget called metaphysical egocentrism -- has nothing to do with infants inability to distinguish them from others, the objective from the subjective, the physical from the psychological, and the like. There is also amassing evidence that shows that children are less able of perspective taking before physical situations than social situations. This is so because social situations are, say, "hot situations", whereas physical situations are, as it were, "cold situations". in other words, social or hot cognition is generally more advanced than psychical or cold cognition.

OL

Dear Orlando, 

I thank you for bringing up the topic of egocentricism, but you must realize that this topic relates more closely with the theory of mind (TOR) and empathy in children than with the spatial/visual form of perspective-taking that I am interested in (which primarily applies to college-aged young adults), or in your terms, the "physical situations".

If you want to stick strictly to the developmental account of egocentricism, then the picture we will arrive at is that allocentric perspective-taking (or "allocentricism", to put it crudely) is an emergent component of egocentric perspective-taking (Note: I'm talking about the visuospatial kind of perspective-taking). So when we reach the operational and post-operational stages, we should be fairly competent (or competent, for children with high spatial IQs) in our abilities to perceive the world allocentrically and visualize how things and events appear from the viewpoints/perspectives of other people. If so, this narrative we get through developmental psychology is linear and does not appear to explain the nuances of individual differences in reference frame use in perspective-taking and the underlying developmental trajectory of such individual differences.

To my knowledge, pre-existing work on exploring individual differences in reference frame preferences has been cross-sectional in nature (comparing different age and racial groups). It will be good if some longitudinal studies on the consistency (or shifts) in reference frame preference/use emerge in the future. Before that, I won't be convinced that egocentric perspective-taking (in both social and physical aspects) has to be the default for young children. Spatial IQ, the education status and SES of parents/guardians, etc., may mediate (or confound) the rate at which young children can learn to perceive or visualize the world allocentrically.

JZ

P.S. Please refer to the works by Tina Iachini et al. for cross sectional studies on developmental changes in reference frame use.

Dear Jimmy,

this is a very interesting question and discussion that developed. Maybe I can add a few thoughts.

First, I would clearly agree and argue that different reference frames (i.e., different egocentric and different allocentric reference frames, plural in both cases) are active in parallel. Several neural networks process spatial information in an efficient manner (without conscious effort). For example, vestibular information during rotation is used for automatically updating egocentric bearing from features in the environment (egocentric FOR) as well as heading direction (allocentric FOR). Thus, the preferred use of one or the other FOR might simply reflect the selection of representational primitives or derived information from one FOR over the other. This is only an option (preference) because information from all FORs is available.

Second, I also agree that specific tasks trigger the use of one or the other FOR. This reflects some form of flexibility in the spatial cognitive architecture that allows animals to use whatever spatial information is available to best reach a certain task goal. When there are no local landmarks to be used for computing a short cut (allocentric FOR) then you might have to rely on idiothetic path integration (which could be represented in an egocentric or an allocentric FOR). Thus, the individual preference to use a certain FOR in one task does not indicate that this is a habitual choice or even a hard-wired preference.

Talking about this last point (hard-wired FOR preferences) I would, as my third point, argue that there is NO hard-wiring at all but only soft-wiring. The genetic basis for the neural foundation of different FOR is present in all animals. However, age-related changes and socio-cultural influences will impact which FORs will be used preferentially. The preferred use of neural networks subserving a specific FOR then leads to plastic processes that might support one spatial orienting strategy at the cost of others. This still does not imply that the neural basis for other spatial strategies is absent. It might simply not be trained to a comparable degree. This also allows for flexibility within species to adapt to specific living environments (with or without rich allothetic cues).

I have developed these ideas with more depth and pointers to the literature in a paper in Spatial Cognition and Computation (Gramann, K. (2013). Embodiment of spatial reference frames and individual differences in reference frame proclivity. Spatial Cognition & Computation, 13(1), 1-25). Maybe that is of interest to you.

There is also an interesting large study looking into geographical and age-related differences in reference frame proclivities (Goeke, C., Kornpetpanee, S., Köster, M., Fernández-Revelles, A. B., Gramann, K., & König, P. (2015). Cultural background shapes spatial reference frame proclivity. Scientific reports, 5, 11426). This, together with the new study by Hugo Spiers and colleagues (Spiers, H., Manley, E., Silva, R., Dalton, R. C., Wiener, J., Hoelscher, C., ... & Hornberger, M. (2017). Population-level spatial navigation ability to detect and predict alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer's & Dementia, 13(7), P1404.), one first insight coming closest to a longitudinal approach to investigating reference frame proclivities.

I attached my papers mentioned above plus the bioRxive version of the article by Hugo Spiers and colleagues.

Best,

Klaus

Klaus, thank you for the lengthy response. I had read your papers, and I will read them again to refresh my LTM. Apparently, the aging paper by Spiers et al. is new. I will read them over the winter break.

Klaus, regarding the chart showing that Northern Europeans, Europeans in general, Americans, Canadians, Aussies, and Kiwis, perform better than the rest of the world in that marine navigation game showcased in SfN 2016, my inner voice tells me that the data is demonstrating White superiority to the undiscerning mind. As an Asian/Chinese who is firmly rooted in the cultural traditions of Chinese history and society, I find the data extremely disturbing.