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For more than a century, social psychologists have been trying to understand how the presence of conspecifics—perhaps the most fundamental invariant of behavior in many, if not all, animal species—affects behavior. Although this issue, traditionally referred to using the term social-facilitation-and-impairment effects, has generated much interest, the impact of social presence on attentional mechanisms—especially those related to executive attention—has been mostly ignored, as have the neural bases of these phenomena. Here, we describe a series of findings indicating that social presence may have strong effects on attentional mechanisms and may even play a key role in the modulation of neuronal activity. Not only do these findings provide new reasons to pay constant attention to the social environment of cognition, but they also have important implications for the practice of psychological science.

There is evidence that attentional control mechanisms in humans can be boosted in performance contexts involving the presence of other human agents, compared with isolation. This phenomenon was investigated here with the presence of artificial agents, that is, humanoid robots in the context of the well-known Stroop task requiring attentional control for successful performance. We expected and found beneficial effects of robotic presence (compared with isolation) on standard Stroop performance and response conflict resolution (a specific component of Stroop performance) exclusively when robotic presence triggered anthropomorphic inferences based on prior verbal interactions with the robot (a social robot condition contrasted with the presence of the same robot without any prior interactions). Participants' anthropomorphic inferences about the social robot actually mediated its influence on attentional control, indicating the social nature of this influence. These findings provide further reasons to pay special attention to human-robot interactions and open new avenues of research in social robotics.

People's ability to resist cognitive distraction is crucial in many situations. The present research examines individuals' resistance to attentional distraction under conditions of evaluative pressure. In a series of 4 studies, participants had to complete various attentional tasks while believing their intelligence was or was not under the scrutiny of an experimenter. Using a spatial cuing paradigm, Studies 1 through 3 demonstrated that feeling evaluated led participants to implement stronger feature-based attentional control, which resulted in more (or less) distraction when irrelevant information matched (did not match) the searched-for target. Study 4 ruled out the possibility that the above effects were due to voluntary shifts of attention and demonstrated that the control settings implemented under evaluative pressure resulted in stronger goal-contingent response priming. Thus, the way individuals relate to the task-the performance context in which they are-induces strong attentional selection biases. Altogether, the present findings highlight an overlooked form of top-down modulation of attention based on performance self-relevance. Implications for both the current models of attentional control and the current hypotheses on the impact of evaluative pressure on cognition, as well as the consequences for more complex performances, are discussed.

The present research examines when and how upward social comparison (USC) affects basic attentional processing. We first propose that USC affects attention only when the dimension of comparison is self-threatening. Second, using a visual probe task, two studies tested whether self-threatening USC results in withdrawing attention from peripheral elements of the task (attentional focusing) or potentiation of prepotent responses (mere effort). results support the attentional focusing hypothesis: USC resulted in less attention being devoted to a peripheral element, even though typically associated with prepotent responses. Moreover, and in contradiction with a mere effort account, findings did not show a general decrease in response latencies (Study 2). This attentional focusing nevertheless only occurred when the task was self-threatening (i.e., presented as a measure of intellectual ability). results are discussed with regard to the potential role of anxiety and arousal in attention narrowing under self-threat.

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In the near future, the human social environment worldwide might be populated by humanoid robots. The way we perceive these new social agents could depend on basic social psychological processes such as social categorization. Recent results indicate that humans can make use of social stereotypes when faced with robots based on their characterization as "male" or "female" and a perception of their group membership. However, the question of the application of nationality-based stereotypes to robots has not yet been studied. Given that humans attribute different levels of warmth and competence (the two universal dimensions of social perception) to individuals based in part on their nationality, we hypothesized that the way robots are perceived differs depending on their country of origin. In this study, participants had to evaluate four robots differing in their anthropomorphic shape. For each participant, these robots were presented as coming from one of four different countries selected for their level of perceived warmth and competence. Each robot was evaluated on their anthropomorphic and human traits. As expected, the country of origin's warmth and competence level biased the perception of robots in terms of the attribution of social and human traits. Our findings also indicated that these effects differed according to the extent to which the robots were anthropomorphically shaped. We discuss these results in relation to the way in which social constructs are applied to robots.

While artificial agents (AA) such as Artificial Intelligence are being extensively developed, a popular belief that AA will someday surpass human intelligence is growing. The present research examined whether this common belief translates into negative psychological and behavioral consequences when individuals assess that an AA performs better than them on cognitive and intellectual tasks. In two studies, participants were led to believe that an AA performed better or less well than them on a cognitive inhibition task (Study 1) and on an intelligence task (Study 2). Results indicated that being outperformed by an AA increased subsequent participants' performance as long as they did not experienced psychological discomfort towards the AA and self-threat. Psychological implications in terms of motivation and potential threat as well as the prerequisite for the future interactions of humans with AAs are further discussed.