Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When sharing tasks, individuals may reduce internal demands by offloading task processing to others – social offloading. Studies have revealed facilitated performance when people believe a jointly acting partner is responsible for task distractors. A proposed mechanism underlying this effect is selective attention. We investigated this using a joint location negative priming (NP) paradigm. In NP tasks, participants initially respond to targets while ignoring distractors (prime phase); at a subsequent probe phase, responses are typically slower to targets in prime distractor locations, reflecting lingering inhibition – the NP effect. Participants (N = 80) completed the task either alone, or believing a partner was responding to distractors. Following a selective attention account, we predicted prime target facilitation followed by increased NP in the joint condition. While results did not reveal facilitation, NP was significantly increased. We propose that these findings demonstrate the way social contexts can shape selective attention to support distributed working.