Effects of Social Skills on Spatial Perspective Taking

Spatial perspective taking is the ability to take the perspective of objects whereas social perspective taking is the ability to take the perspective of another person in a social situation. Past research has shown that better social skills have been corelated with having better spatial perspective taking abilities. However, other research on similar topics have revealed no such results and have provided evidence for the two abilities being separate. These research studies focused solely on a singular test to measure social skills which was the social and communication subscale of the Autism-Quotient. Therefore, we added two new tests as measures of social skills and combined them with the results from our spatial test. 33 participants complete the Spatial Orientation Test (SOT; Hegarty & Waller, 2004) which tested spatial perspective taking abilities and the social and communication subscales of the Autism-Quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), the Perspective Taking Mindset Measure (Ragins & Ehrhardt, 2021), and the Social Perspective Propensity Scale (Gehlbach et al., 2008) which measured social skills. Our results revealed that there was no significant correlation between the results of the SOT and the social skills test, meaning that someone’s social skills were not related to their spatial perspective taking abilities. In conclusion, the addition of two new social skills test helped us provide further evidence that social skills and spatial perspective taking were not correlated.