ArticlePsychological research2020
Socially alerted cognition evoked by a confederate's mere presence: analysis of reaction-time distributions and delta plots.
Article in Psychological research, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Restoration of Attention by Rest in a Multitasking World: Theory, Methodology, and Empirical Evidence.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- Lapses of attention.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- On dueling multi-act arithmetic: exploring the dynamics of goal-driven competition on engagement and cognition.Experimental brain research · 2025Article
- UCancellation: A new mobile measure of selective attention and concentration.Behavior research methods · 2022Article
- On doing multi-act arithmetic: A multitrait-multimethod approach of performance dimensions in integrated multitasking.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We examined aspects of social alerting as induced through the presence of an attentive but non-evaluative confederate on mental efficiency. To this end, individuals were administered with a chained mental-arithmetic task (levels: low vs. high demand) in two contextual conditions (levels: alone vs. presence). In addition, we examined self-report measures of subjective state for purposes of control. As a result, the presence (vs. alone) condition improved (not hampered) processing speed (while error rate remained low overall), and this effect was differentially more pronounced for high (vs. low) demand. Reaction-time distributional analyses revealed that improvements in average performance actually originated from a selective speeding-up in the slower percentiles, indicating that social alerting promotes stability of information-processing throughput. These results challenge prevalent theoretical notions of mere-presence effects as individuals became consistently faster and less vulnerable to commit attention failure. Our findings indicate that social presence promotes not only processing speed but volitional steadiness.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.