The relationship between visuospatial processing and mental imagery within empathic responses when comprehending stories

Abstract

When reading stories, readers may experience empathic responses. This study examines whether visuospatial processing is activated within the processes that elicit empathic responses when comprehending stories. We also examine whether the perceptual properties of visuospatial processing are the same as those of mental imagery. More specifically, we conducted a dual-task experiment combing both story comprehension and visuospatial-memory tasks that investigated whether load in the visuospatial-memory task interfered with the empathic responses of story comprehension. The results showed that load in the visuospatial-memory task decreased empathic response scores for story comprehension. However, the results did not observe a relationship between load in the visuospatial-memory task and mental imagery. Accordingly, these findings suggest that visuospatial processing may be involved in empathic responses when comprehending stories, even though the similarities with mental imagery remain unclear.