One of the earliest findings in social psychology was that performance is modulated by the social nature of a given context. The mere presence of others has been shown to improve (facilitates) or impair (inhibits) performance. The acknowledgement of this effect had a great impact on society, for instance by conceiving working "open spaces" for some type of tasks. Our current societal demands require more knowledge of social presence effects, especially the knowledge of how it impacts our brain and cognitive activity.Our research has offered new insights to this question. Based on those and in the light of the information from other cognitive and neuroscience approaches, we now suggest a new avenue to the field: focusing on how social presence modulates the interplay between the associative and monitoring thinking. With this new focus we proposed the "tuning processing approach" grounded on two assumptions.First, mere social presence tunes earlier attention processes, increasing the scope of individual?s attention to internal and external information. This leads to a spread of our mind, which becomes more sensitive to different context cues. Second, social presence tunes attention to monitoring mechanisms allowing for better control of undesirable interferences. We further suggest that the effect of the mere presence should be found in the interplay between two processes: higher attention to our environment (increasing the likelihood of adaptive responses) and a more active role for the executive control so as to select what is relevant to our current goals and guaranteeing an adaptive reaction. Our aim now is to provide support to this theoretical framework, with several experimental studies. Their design is derived from well-known paradigms of cognitive (e.g. Stroop, Flanker tasks), social (e.g. anchoring) and neuroscience approaches (using ERP measures). In addition, we aim to show the relevance of these cognitive processes for socially relevant phenomena: stereotyping and eating. By understanding how the mind is tuned to social and non-social contexts, we will be able to offer new insights on how/when prejudiced reactions emerge. By understanding how the mind detects and controls the influence of contextual cues, we may advance our knowledge about the ways to control food intake in both isolated and social contexts.We believe this approach to be fundamental both to scientific questions and important societal issues.First because it challenges the often made assumption that given that our mind is social cognitive processing should identical in isolated and social contexts. Second because nowadays we rely more on our cognitive abilities and working in isolated contexts (usually at a computer). It is thus now more relevant than ever to understand the consequences of a lack of social presence effects on cognition. Only this understanding will allow us to efficiently use its advantages and disadvantages for different cognitive performances.

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With the objective to increase the research activity directed towards the achievement of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, the possibility of associating scientific projects with the Sustainable Development Goals is now available in Ciência_Iscte. These are the Sustainable Development Goals identified for this project. For more detailed information on the Sustainable Development Goals, click here.