Pronouns and Visual Perspective-Taking: Two Replication Results

In 2007, our laboratory conducted a series of experiments examining whether pronouns embedded in short sentences (e.g., I am/You are/He is peeling the cucumber.) modulate reaction times when participants are tasked to verify whether a picture depicts a described action. Critically, the picture depicted an actor performing the action (e.g., peeling a cucumber) from either the actor’s internal perspective, or the perspective of an external observer. Our results demonstrated that description pronouns do indeed interact with picture perspectives; response times showed faster verifications when the implied perspectives of the pronouns and pictures matched rather than mismatched. As expected the grammatical persons I am and You are promoted faster response times when verifying internal rather than external perspective pictures; in contrast, He is promoted faster response times when verifying external rather than internal perspective pictures. We interpreted these findings as indicating that readers use pronouns to differentiate perspectives, and are more likely to internalize the action when they are directly addressed as the protagonist (You are) or the sentence uses the first-person perspective (I am). These findings were published in Psychological Science in 2009. In this replication attempt, we conducted two experiments to understand the robustness and reliability of our original effects, with an emphasis on individual differences in pronominal perspective-taking.