Examining Social Facilitation In Vigilance: A Hit And A Miss

Keywords

human performance; social facilitation; supervisor; Vigilance

Abstract

Vigilance is the ability of an observer to maintain attention for extended periods of time; however, performance tends to decline with time on watch, a pattern referred to as the vigilance decrement. Previous research has focused on factors that attenuate the decrement; however, one factor rarely studied is the effect of social facilitation. The purpose for the present investigation was to determine how different types of social presence affected the performance, workload and stress of vigilance. It was hypothesised that the presence of a supervisory figure would increase overall performance, but may occur at the cost of increased workload and stress. Results indicated that the per cent of false alarm and response times decreased in the presence of a supervisory figure. Using social facilitation in vigilance tasks may thus have positive, as well as, negative effects depending on the dependent measure of interest and the role of the observer. Practitioner Summary: Social facilitation has rarely been examined in the context of vigilance, even though it may improve performance. Vigilance task performance was examined under social presence. The results of the present study indicated that false alarms and response times decreased in the social presence of a supervisory figure, thus improving performance.

Publication Date

11-2-2017

Publication Title

Ergonomics

Volume

60

Issue

11

Number of Pages

1485-1499

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2017.1308563

Socpus ID

85017032198 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85017032198

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