Exploring the temporal dynamics of social facilitation in the Stroop task

Abstract

The importance of social context in affecting attention has recently been highlighted by the finding that the presence of a passive, nonevaluative confederate can improve selective attention. The underlying mechanism, however, remains unclear. In this paper, we argue that social facilitation can be caused by distractor inhibition. Two distinct sources of evidence are provided from an experiment employing the Stroop task with and without social presence. First, analysis of the response time (RT) distribution indicates that interference is reduced at relatively long RTs. This is consistent with an inhibitory mechanism, whose effects build up slowly. Further support is provided by showing that social facilitation is prevented by using short response-to-stimulus intervals that are thought to reduce cognitive control processes.

The influence of mere social presence on Stroop interference: New evidence from the semantically-based Stroop task

“…Somewhat in agreement with this latter possibility, Huguet and colleagues' second and more recent account labeled late selection account (see Discussion and conclusion) suggests that at the early stage (i.e., semantic and lexical), Stroop words are processed normally (Sharma et al, 2010).…”

“…After the participants had completed the practice trials, the female experimenter presented those assigned to the "social presence" condition with a cover story that was identical to the one used by Sharma et al (2010). In short, the participants performed the experimental task with a female confederate (who could not see the computer screen) in the room.…”

“…1;Klauer, Herfordt, & Voss, 2008;Sharma, Booth, Brown, & Huguet, 2010). Huguet et al (1999) considered such finding as "inconsistent with the widespread view (…) that lexical and semantic analyses of single words are uncontrollable" (p. 1023) and concluded that social presence can "(…) prevent the computation of semantics" (p. 1023).…”

“…Since the aim of Experiment 1 was to replicate and extend the work of Huguet and colleagues (Huguet et al, 1999, Exp. 1;Sharma et al, 2010) to a vocal task, the amplitude of the Stroop interference was computed by comparing the incongruent trials with the control signs ("+++++") used in these past studies. However, given that this type of control artificially inflates the Stroop interference effect (e.g., Klauer et al, 2008), a more conventional control condition consisting of neutral words was used in Experiment 2.…”

Choking under monitoring pressure: being watched by the experimenter reduces executive attention

“…When attending to others is incompatible with the task demands, attentional conflict may ensue, a form of response conflict regarding what attentional response one should make (Baron, 1986;Huguet, Barbet, Belletier, Monteil, & Fagot, 2014;Huguet, Dumas, & Monteil, 2004;Huguet, Galvaing, Monteil, & Dumas, 1999;Muller & Butera, 2007;Normand, Bouquet, & Croizet, 2014;Sharma, Booth, Brown, & Huguet, 2010). This conflict, in turn, may lead to poor performance on difficult or attentiondemanding tasks.…”