Perspectives, They Might Be a-Changin': A Proactive-Control Take on the Cognitive Cost of Maintaining One's Own Perspective

The world abounds with different perspectives, which necessitates balancing between maintaining the currently relevant perspective and flexibly switching between perspectives, if needed. Employing the distinction between reactive and proactive control (Braver, 2012), we argue that previous research on perspective-taking has mainly looked at the cost of activating reactive control to deal with what is happening now. Here we examine the cost of activating proactive control in order to be prepared for what might happen in the future. In three experiments, we embed a perspective-taking task (Samson et al., 2010) into a task-switching design and calculate perspective-mixing costs to capture proactive control. We show that a context in which perspective shifts might occur unpredictably (compared to a context in which such shifts are not expected) results in a poorer ability to maintain any perspective, but especially one's own.