Mapping human vigilance: The influence of conspecifics

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

A considerable volume of animal research on detecting threat and foraging reveals that the co-presence of conspecifics reduces vigilance and enhances foraging. Monitoring threat is an adaptive process and is of considerable relevance to humans. It is therefore important to understand how the presence of others influences threat monitoring - namely vigilance - and consequently the capacity to detect threats. We examine this with a novel paradigm, that simulates a “foraging under threat” situation, with an eye-tracker (allowing the examination of the allocation of attention). Our results show, as predicted, that participants in the individual condition (versus co-presence) allocated more attentional resources to scanning the environment and thereby sacrificing foraging, which increased their likelihood of detecting threatening events. Thus, the presence or absence of others modulates vigilance strategies in humans. These findings highlight the heuristic value of animal vigilance models to understand humans threat monitoring with considerable applied relevance.