Behavioral and EEG Measures Show no Amplifying Effects of Shared Attention on Attention or Memory
Mairon and colleagues tested a claim that had been gathering momentum, that experiencing something in the presence of another person attending to the same thing intensifies the experience. Participants viewed emotional and neutral images while performing an unrelated counting task, once alone and once in the same room as another person doing the same, with brain activity recorded throughout and memory for the images tested afterwards. The results are mostly negative. There was an effect of shared attention on the attention task itself, but not on later recognition of the images. The brain measures behaved as expected for the stimuli, with larger responses to task-relevant items and to emotional images, but showed no difference between being alone and sharing the room. The authors conclude that shared attention may act on a narrower range of processes than previous work suggested, and that effects reported earlier may reflect communication or motivation rather than a change in perception or memory. A useful corrective for claims about shared experience.
Mairon and colleagues tested a claim that had been gathering momentum, that experiencing something in the presence of another person attending to the same thing intensifies the experience. Participants viewed emotional and neutral images while performing an unrelated counting task, once alone and once in the same room as another person doing the same, with brain activity recorded throughout and memory for the images tested afterwards. The results are mostly negative. There was an effect of shared attention on the attention task itself, but not on later recognition of the images. The brain measures behaved as expected for the stimuli, with larger responses to task-relevant items and to emotional images, but showed no difference between being alone and sharing the room. The authors conclude that shared attention may act on a narrower range of processes than previous work suggested, and that effects reported earlier may reflect communication or motivation rather than a change in perception or memory. A useful corrective for claims about shared experience.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
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10, 8458. N = 42 UC Berkeley undergraduates in pairs, ~90 cm from a shared screen, silent flower-counting, ~10 minutes per run. No shared-attention effect on attention or memory; Bayes factors 0.13 to 0.64 supporting the null. Flower-counting accuracy 94.35 per cent alone against 86.25 per cent shared, t(39) = 5.62, d = 1.04. Full text read.
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The source
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-65311-7
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-65311-7