Dissociating contributions of head and torso to spatial reference frames: The misalignment paradigm

- A novel paradigm for isolating contribution of body parts to egocentric judgements.
- Both head and torso contribute to egocentric frame of reference.
- Differences in visual salience between body parts do not drive the effects.

When we represent someone's view of a scene as egocentrically structured, where do we represent the origin of the reference frame? By analysing responses in a spatial perspective-taking task as a function of spatial location with respect to both head and torso, we isolated the respective contribution of each part to spatial judgments. Both the head and the torso contributed to judgements, though with greater contributions from the torso. A second experiment manipulating visual contrast of the torso showed that this does not reflect low-level differences in visual salience between body parts. Our results demonstrate that spatial perspective-taking relies on a weighted combination of reference frames centred on different parts of the body.