Abstract
This paper tests the hypothesis that social presence influences size perception by increasing context sensitivity. Consistent with Allport’s prediction, we expected to find greater context sensitivity in participants who perform a visual task in the presence of other people (i.e., in co-action) than in participants who perform the task in isolation. Supporting this hypothesis, participants performing an Ebbinghaus illusion-based task in co-action showed greater size illusions than those performing the task in isolation. Specifically, participants in a social context had greater difficulty perceiving the correct size of a target circle and ignoring its surroundings. Analyses of delta plot functions suggest a mechanism of interference monitoring, since that when individuals take longer to respond, they are better able to ignore the surrounding circles. However, this type of monitoring interference was not moderated by social presence. We discuss how this lack of moderation might be the reason why the impact of social presence on context sensitivity is able to be detected in tasks such as the Ebbinghaus illusion.
Highlights
Allport [1] was the first to note that social presence increases context sensitivity
Because the context influence is more likely to occur in more ambiguous trials, we expected a main effect of the size difference factor reflecting a linear trend
The results of our experiment showed that participants in the presence of others perform worse at an Ebbinghaus illusion task than participants in isolation
Summary
Allport [1] was the first to note that social presence increases context sensitivity. We predict that participants performing the Ebbinghaus illusion task in the presence of others will show increased context sensitivity relatively to those performing it in isolation This experiment explores how social presence modulates individuals' performance on the size perception task associated with the Ebbinghaus illusion. Because later inhibition mechanisms are not expected to exert an influence in accuracy, we do not expect social presence to impact the delta curve slopes Since those later attentional processes will not interfere with the performance on this task, we predict that delta plots will have the same linear increase with time in both the social presence and isolation conditions
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