Being observed caused physiological stress leading to poorer face recognition

Abstract

Being observed when completing physical and mental tasks alters how successful people are at completing them. This has been explained in terms of evaluation apprehension, drive theory, and due to the effects of stress caused by being observed. In three experiments, we explore how being observed affects participants' ability to recognise faces as it relates to the aforementioned theorieseasier face recognition tasks should be completed with more success under observation relative to harder tasks. In Experiment 1, we found that being observed during the learning phase of an old/new recognition paradigm caused participants to be less accurate at the test phase than not being observed. Being observed at test did not affect accuracy. We replicated these findings in an line-up type task in Experiment 2. Finally, in Experiment 3, we assessed whether these effects were due to the difficulty of the task or due to the physiological stress being observed caused. We found that while observation caused physiological stress, it did not relate to accuracy. Moderately difficult tasks (upright unfamiliar face recognition and inverted familiar face recognition) were detrimentally affected by being observed, whereas easy (upright familiar face recognition) and difficult tasks (inverted unfamiliar face recognition) were unaffected by this manipulation. We explain these results in terms of the direct effects being observed has on task performance for moderately difficult tasks and discuss the implications of these results to cognitive psychological experimentation.

The effects of transcranial direct current stimulation on perceptual learning for upright faces and its role in the composite face effect.

“…Critically, in a further experiment the same authors showed that the inversion effect was reestablished once that the subjects were provided with humanizing information as regards individuals diagnosed with autism. Hills et al (2019) showed the inversion effect was completely eliminated when the subjects believed they were being observed by the experimenter during the study. The authors suggested that social observation can cause the subjects to become somewhat anxious leading to reduced performance (especially for the upright faces) in a relatively difficult task (recognition of unfamiliar faces).…”

Individual differences in emotion regulation and face recognition

“…In support of this possibility, an early study reported that participants in a moderate arousal condition had higher face recognition ability than those in the high arousal condition [46]. More recently, Hills et al (2019) examined how being observed affects face recognition and found that being observed during learning, but not during the test phase, impaired recognition accuracy using an old/new recognition memory and eyewitness identification paradigms [47]. Although being observed was associated with increased physiological arousal as indexed by galvanic skin response and heart rate, these authors found that this heightened arousal did not explain the detriments in face recognition [47].…”

“…More recently, Hills et al (2019) examined how being observed affects face recognition and found that being observed during learning, but not during the test phase, impaired recognition accuracy using an old/new recognition memory and eyewitness identification paradigms [47]. Although being observed was associated with increased physiological arousal as indexed by galvanic skin response and heart rate, these authors found that this heightened arousal did not explain the detriments in face recognition [47]. Nevertheless, face recognition has been found to negatively associate with generalized anxiety [44,[48][49][50][51]; but for an inconsistent finding see [52] as well as social anxiety more specifically [53].…”

“…To summarize, there are wide individual differences in face recognition [e.g., for reviews see 1-3] and these individual differences are stable across different face perception and recognition tasks [25][26][27][28]. There have been many factors identified in the literature that may help to explain this variation including: (i) demographic characteristics including race [15][16][17][18], age [19,20], and gender [21,24]; (ii) a range of visual cognitive abilities such as general memory [8,13,32], object perception [11,26], and perceptual speed [9,33,34]; (iii) personality traits such as extraversion [36][37][38]45], neuroticism/low emotional stability [36][37][38][39]44], impulsiveness [9,11,26], and socio-emotional empathy [54]; and (iv) anxiety-related symptomatology including generalized anxiety [44,[48][49][50][51], social anxiety [53], physiological arousal [47].…”

Early Childhood Education Teacher Well-Being: Performativity as a Means of Coping

“…Hills et al, ( 2019 ) demonstrated that simply being observed was enough to induce stress, and to reduce the ability of the one being observed to perform the task in question. The participating teachers of this study applied this same logic to the CLASS (Pianta et al, 2008 ).…”