Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic “perspective-taking” effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Drawing inspiration from “novel entity” paradigms from infant gaze–following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g., arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. The rationale for this is that submentalising processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. In this study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalising” processes. In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others.
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