Evaluative social presence can improve vigilance performance, but vigilance is still hard work and is stressful.

Abstract

Vigilance is the ability to sustain attention over a period of time. Previous research has indicated that vigilance tasks are hard work and are stressful for human operators. Performance tends to decline with time on task, and workload and stress typically increase during the course of the vigil. Methods that could be used to overcome the adverse effects of vigilance (i.e., stress, workload, poor performance) includes social facilitation factors, such as performing the task while under observation. Thus, the present experiments examined the effects of multiple forms of social facilitation on vigilance, as well as the stress and workload associated with performing the task. Over 2 experiments, 284 participants completed a 24-min cognitive vigilance task. The results indicated that evaluative-based forms of social presence (i.e., direct monitoring, electronic performance monitoring) were associated with improved detection performance. The mere social presence of a monitor did not significantly influence vigilance performance. The results also demonstrated that social facilitation (in any form) did not impose additional stress or workload on the observers. These novel results have both important practical and theoretical implications for both vigilance performance and social facilitation.

Neural bases of social facilitation and inhibition: how peer presence affects elementary eye movements

“…Particularly, Yu and Wu, as well as Liu and Yu showed an effect of social presence on reaction time (RT) in a visual search task, which depended on the task difficulty parametrically controlled by the number of visual distractors present in the scene Yu & Wu, 2015). Clayppole and Szalma showed only a social facilitation in a Go/NoGo vigilance task (Victoria L Claypoole & Szalma, 2018a, 2018bVictoria Lynne Claypoole et al, 2019). Using saccade tasks, McFall, Jamieson and Harkins also showed only a social facilitation on RT, regardless of whether subjects performed blocks of reflexive prosaccades (saccades toward the target) or voluntary antisaccades (saccades away from the target, towards its mirror location) (McFall et al, 2009).…”