Facilitating Sustained Attention: Is Mere Presence Sufficient?

Abstract

Abstract Research on sustained attention regularly reports declines in task performance as a function of time on task, a phenomenon commonly called the vigilance decrement. Therefore, previous work from theoretical and applied fields has focused on attenuating this performance decrement. Recently, aspects of social facilitation have been used to attain this goal. Social facilitation, or improving task performance through the social presence of an individual, has been found to improve performance on sustained attention tasks. However, the extent to which the forms of social facilitation can mitigate performance are unclear. Thus, the impetus of the present research was to explore the effects of two prevalent forms of social facilitation (i.e., mere presence and evaluative presence) on a sustained attention (i.e., vigilance) task. In sum, 132 observers completed a 24-min cognitive-based vigilance task. The results indicated that an evaluative presence produced the strongest effects on performance, such that the proportion of false alarms was significantly reduced relative to no social presence. Moreover, the mere presence of an individual did not significantly improve vigilance task performance. The results of the present experiment suggest that an evaluative context may be necessary for social presence to improve detection performance on tasks that require sustained attention.