Introduction: Research on the Hawthorne Effect suggests that behavior changes dramatically when participants know they are being watched (Kidwai and Abujudeh 2015). However, it is unknown if the Hawthorne Effect affects neural responses as measured by event related potentials (ERPs). It is also not known whether the Hawthorn Effect affects incidental learning. We hypothesize that telling partic...

The mere presence of a depiction of eyes can elicit a sense of being watched in the perceiver. To this date, the factors affecting the intensity of this sense of being watched, however, have not been investigated. In the present experiment, we tested the impact of two potentially relevant variables: arousal (manipulated using specific musical pieces) and duration of the perceptual episode (mani...

Current models in social neuroscience advance that eye contact may automatically recruit cognitive resources. Here, we directly tested this hypothesis by evaluating the distracting strength of eye contact on concurrent visual processing in the well-known Stroop's paradigm. As expected, participants showed stronger Stroop interference under concomitant eye contact as compared to closed eyes. Two...