Abstract
Visual perspective taking (VPT) is a fundamental component of social cognition, allowing individuals to understand environments from diverse viewpoints. Explicit VPT involves deliberately adopting another person’s perspective, whereas implicit VPT reflects the incidental influence of others’ viewpoints when responding from one’s own. Oxytocin (OT), a neuropeptide known for its role in social bonding, has been proposed to influence self–other processing, though its effects on VPT remain unclear. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled study, seventy-nine healthy male participants (Oxytocin = 39, Placebo = 40) completed explicit and implicit VPT tasks. Participants judged object locations from an avatar’s perspective (explicit) or from their own perspective (implicit), in the presence of a human agent or an object. OT administration was associated with reduced accuracy in the explicit task under perspective conflict, reflecting increased egocentric interference. In contrast, in the implicit task, OT was associated with faster and more accurate responses in congruent trials involving a human agent. Together, these findings indicate that oxytocin-related effects on visual perspective taking vary across task demands and social context. Rather than reflecting a general enhancement or impairment of perspective-taking ability, the results provide behavioral evidence consistent with differential modulation of self-other processing.
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Data availability
The behavioral data that support the findings of this study is available on OSF: https://osf.io/k3t2f/.
Code Availability
All codes used to generate the analyses is available on OSF: https://osf.io/k3t2f/.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Program for National Natural Science Foundation of China (32171019), the MOE Project of Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences in Universities (22JJD190004), and Research Center for Brain Cognition and Human Development, Guangdong, China (2024B0303390003) to C.Q. This work was also supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche-ANR (grant number: ANR-20-CE28-0006) and by the Odysseus programme, Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO, grant number: G0DCE23N) to L.B. We are grateful to Xinping Huang for assistance with data collection.
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Y.H., L.B., and C.Q. designed the research. Y.H., C.Q., and C.W. conducted experiments. Y.H. analyzed the data. Y.H. and L.B. wrote the original manuscript. C.Q. reviewed the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.
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Huang, Y., Qu, C., Wei, C. et al. Oxytocin-induced modulation of explicit and implicit visual perspective taking. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-40445-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-40445-2
