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.

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The use of coactors may be an avenue for organizations to consider utilizing to improve performance because of its relative cost-effectiveness and easy implementation.

Thomson, Besner, and Smilek (2016) propose that performance decrements associated with sustained attention are not consistently the result of a decline in perceptual sensitivity. Thomson et al. (2016) present empirical evidence using a novel, nontraditional vigilance task to support their assumptions. However, in the present rebuttal, we argue that the authors have not only have misinterpreted previous research in sustained attention, but also have misapplied those interpretations to their study. Thomson et al. have also neglected key elements of the literature in their argument, including research on expectancy theory and individual differences on vigilance performance. Furthermore, Thomson and colleagues implement an experimental paradigm that is not appropriate for evaluating sensitivity and bias changes in vigilance tasks. Finally, their analyses do not capture the manner in which changes in response bias and sensitivity can manifest in signal detection theory. We discuss the theoretical and experimental issues contained in Thomson et al. (2016) and propose suggestions for future vigilance research in this area. (PsycINFO Database Record

Recently, experimental studies of vigilance have been deployed using online data collection methods. This data collection strategy is not new to the psychological sciences, but it is relatively new to basic research assessing vigilance performance, as studies in this area of research tend to collect data in the laboratory or in the field. The present study partially replicated the results of a newly developed online vigilance task (Thomson, Besner, & Smilek, 2016). A sample of 130 participants completed the semantic vigilance task created by Thomson et al. (2016) in a research laboratory setting. The present results replicated Thomson et al. (2016) when nonparametric and corrected signal detection measures were used. We suggest that some vigilance tasks typically performed in the laboratory could be administered online. However, we encourage researchers to consider the following factors prior to studying vigilance performance online: (a) the type of vigilance task, (b) the length of the vigilance task, and (c) the signal detection indices most appropriate for their research. It is quite possible that some analyses may yield significant results, whereas other signal detection measures may not (i.e., parametric indices vs. nonparametric indices vs. "corrected" indices) and this point is discussed further in our article. (PsycINFO Database Record