Summary: According to researchers, when people are aware they are being observed, brain areas associated with social awareness and reward activate a part of the brain that affects motor control, helping them to perform better at skilled tasks.
Source: Johns Hopkins University.
Often people think performing in front of others will make them mess up, but a new study led by a Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist found the opposite: being watched makes people do better.
When people know they are being observed, parts of the brain associated with social awareness and reward invigorate a part of the brain that controls motor skills, improving their performance at skilled tasks. The findings, published today in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, could help people become more effective in the workplace and in school.
“You might think having people watch you isn’t going to help, but it might actually make you perform better,” said lead author Vikram Chib, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins and the Kennedy Krieger Institute. “An audience can serve as an extra bit of incentive.”
Chib, who has studied what happens in the brain when people choke under pressure, originally launched this project to investigate how performance suffers under social observation. But it quickly became clear that in certain situations, having an audience spurred people to do better, the same way it would if money were on the line.
Previous studies have shown that when people are observed, brain activity jumps in areas of the brain known for thinking about others, even if people aren’t doing anything that others could judge. But researchers had not tested to what degree, if any, people in front of an audience might work harder in pursuit of a reward, or what happens in the brain during this type of social situation.
Chib and his co-authors devised an experiment, held at the California Institute of Technology, in which 20 participants performed a task and were paid a small amount of money contingent on how well they did. The task was a video game similar to Wii or Xbox Kinect. The participants performed the task both in front of an audience of two and with no one watching. Their brain activity was monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging.
When participants knew an audience was watching, a part of the prefrontal cortex associated with social cognition, particularly the thoughts and intentions of others, activated along with another part of the cortex associated with reward. Together these signals triggered activity in the ventral striatum, an area of the brain that motivates action and motor skills.
In essence, the presence of an audience, at least a small one, increased people’s incentive to perform well, Chib said, and the brain scans validated this by showing the neural mechanism for how it happens.
While people were watching, participants were an average of 5 percent better at the video game—and as much as 20 percent better. Only two participants didn’t perform better in front of others.
But if the audience was a lot bigger, and the stakes higher, the results could have gone the other way.
“Here, people with social anxiety tended to perform better,” Chib said, “but at some point, the size of the audience could increase the size of one’s anxiety. … We still need to figure that out.”
Source: Johns Hopkins University
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
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Original Research: Open access research for “Neural substrates of social facilitation effects on incentive-based performance” by Vikram S Chib, Ryo Adachi, and John P O’Doherty in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Published April 10 2018
doi:10.1093/scan/nsy024
[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]Johns Hopkins University ” Having an Audience May Help You Perform Better.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 20 April 2018.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/audience-performance-8849/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]Johns Hopkins University (2018, April 20). Having an Audience May Help You Perform Better. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved April 20, 2018 from https://neurosciencenews.com/audience-performance-8849/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]Johns Hopkins University ” Having an Audience May Help You Perform Better.” https://neurosciencenews.com/audience-performance-8849/ (accessed April 20, 2018).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]
Abstract
Neural substrates of social facilitation effects on incentive-based performance
Throughout our lives we must perform tasks while being observed by others. Previous studies have shown that the presence of an audience can cause increases in an individual’s performance as compared to when they are not being observed—a phenomenon called ‘social facilitation’. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this effect, in the context of skilled-task performance for monetary incentives, are not well understood. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor brain activity while healthy human participants performed a skilled-task during conditions in which they were paid based on their performance and observed and not observed by an audience. We found that during social facilitation, social signals represented in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) enhanced reward value computations in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). We also found that functional connectivity between dmPFC and ventral striatum was enhanced when participants exhibited social facilitation effects, indicative of a means by which social signals serve to modulate brain regions involved in regulating behavioral motivation. These findings illustrate how neural processing of social judgments gives rise to the enhanced motivational state that results in social facilitation of incentive-based performance.
