Examining social facilitation in vigilance: a hit and a miss

Abstract

Vigilance is the ability of an observer to maintain attention for extended periods of time; however, performance tends to decline with time on watch, a pattern referred to as the vigilance decrement. Previous research has focused on factors that attenuate the decrement; however, one factor rarely studied is the effect of social facilitation. The purpose for the present investigation was to determine how different types of social presence affected the performance, workload and stress of vigilance. It was hypothesised that the presence of a supervisory figure would increase overall performance, but may occur at the cost of increased workload and stress. Results indicated that the per cent of false alarm and response times decreased in the presence of a supervisory figure. Using social facilitation in vigilance tasks may thus have positive, as well as, negative effects depending on the dependent measure of interest and the role of the observer. Practitioner Summary: Social facilitation has rarely been examined in the context of vigilance, even though it may improve performance. Vigilance task performance was examined under social presence. The results of the present study indicated that false alarms and response times decreased in the social presence of a supervisory figure, thus improving performance.

Peer Presence Effects on Eye Movements and Attentional Performance

“…The present study thus provides the first evidence of a social modulation of saccades induced by the simple presence of a familiar peer and modulated by task difficulty, thereby strengthening a growing body of evidence showing social modulations of eye movements (McFall et al, 2009;Strukelj et al, 2012;Yu and Wu, 2015;Claypoole and Szalma, 2017;Liu and Yu, 2017;Oliva et al, 2017). This could have an important impact on real-life applications, and particularly in high stake professional activities.…”

“…By contrast, how others' mere presence affects attention processes, and the eye movements upon which they rest has long been undocumented. Only over the last 3 years can we found behavioral studies investigating social presence effects in visual search tasks assessing selective spatial attention (Yu and Wu, 2015;Liu and Yu, 2017), in a continuous performance task (CPT) assessing vigilance, i.e., attention sustained over time (Claypoole and Szalma, 2017), and in saccades tasks assessing eye movements, both pro-and anti-saccades (McFall et al, 2009;Strukelj et al, 2012;Oliva et al, 2017). The data remain patchy and are sometimes contradictory, but they provide the proof of concept that all three facets of attention (eye movements, attention in space, and attention in time) can be modified by others' mere presence.…”

“…This could have an important impact on real-life applications, and particularly in high stake professional activities. For example, in a test conducted by the US Transportation Security Administration, agents in charge of luggage safety checking missed 95% of targets (weapons, explosives;CNN, 2015;Claypoole and Szalma, 2017). Adding a social presence could be a low-cost and The socially tested subjects are showed in green line, and the subjects tested alone are showed in red line.…”

Social facilitation effect in search and decision‐making components of visual inspection

“…When performing easy tasks with an audience, people develop a mode of working fast to compensate for the time they know they would lose by being distracted by the audience. By contrast, difficult tasks result in an excessive cognitive load (Sweller, ; Sweller, van Merrienboer, & Paas, ), and the presence of others can serve as an additional cognitive load in performing difficult tasks (Claypoole & Szalma, ). The difficulty of the task and the presence of distraction (i.e., having a human audience) might increase stress, arousal, or distraction in performing difficult tasks compared with performing easy tasks, as supported by the arousal results in the current study.…”

Determining effects of virtually and physically present co‐actor in evoking social facilitation

“…Triplett () also argued that the presence of other people provokes personal competitive instincts; he validated his views by testing the speed of children, who turned a fishing reel both while they were alone and while they were working with others. Afterward, many researchers investigated social facilitation effect in a wide range of areas, including physical work, such as motor skill tasks (Butki, ; Martens, ), and running (Worringham & Messick, ); cognitive work, such as maze task (Jackson & Williams, ; Rajecki, Ickes, Corcoran, & Lenerz, ); Stroop task (Huguet, Galvaing, Monteil, & Dumas, ; Sharma, Booth, Brown, & Huguet, ), anagram task (Davidson & Henderson, ), modular arithmetic task (Park & Catrambone, ), vigilance task (Claypoole & Szalma, ), and social behaviors, such as gambling (Cole, Barrett, & Griffiths, ) and eating (De Castro, ). Previous studies indicated that the presence of other people affect task performance mediated by task difficulty, that is, presence of others enhances performance of easy tasks and inhibits performance of difficult tasks.…”