Prosodic marking of contrastive focus in Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder.

Social cognition encompasses all those mental processes that enable individuals to understand, interpret, and respond to others' thoughts, intentions, and behaviors. These abilities are essential in complex social contexts and play a central role in influencing decision-making in our daily social interactions (). Indeed, from an evolutionary perspective, they have developed to guide humans through the often unpredictable emotional, cognitive, and behavioral motives of others, thus promoting effective collaboration and social cohesion (). Within the wide spectrum of social cognition processes, refers to the ability to understand others by adopting their individual perspective and point of view (). This process comprises multiple components: perspective-taking involves reasoning about others' thoughts, beliefs, and intentions, while perspective-taking relates to understanding their emotions and feelings (). In addition, perspective-taking concerns the perceptual ability to imagine how the world appears from another person's visual point of view (). Perspective-taking not only influences social interactions, driving individuals to mimic traits and behaviors of a target person (), but can also shape how we engage with media and communication content. For example, in the context of video advertisements (ads), adopting a character's point of view and understanding his/her emotions and cognitions may enhance overall ad liking (). Indeed, research shows that when ads portray characters physically interacting with products—such as eating or drinking—viewers tend to mentally represent these actions by adoptingthe character's perspective (), a simulation that could enhance message acceptance () and increase subjective craving for the advertised product (). This suggests that perspective-taking may act as a mechanism underlying advertising effectiveness, promoting both engagement with the ad, its message, and a more positive product perception. This view is also supported by theoretical models such as the Narrative Transportation Theory, which emphasizes the role of character identification and immersion in shaping persuasive communication (). Within this framework, perspective-taking can be seen as a mean for narrative transportation, deepening identification, involvement, and finally increasing message sensitivity and acceptance. In this sense, perspective-taking can be regarded as one of the psychological processes to be examined within Consumer Neuroscience, a field that aims to explore the neural and physiological mechanisms underlying consumer perception, emotion, and decision-making processes (). Adopting a consumer neuroscience approach to study perspective-taking may, therefore, help develop integrative models of consumer response to advertising, as well as other communication and marketing content, linking cognitive and affective processes to behavioral outcomes.