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Throughout our lives wemust perform tasks while being observed by others. Previous studies have shown that the presence of an audience can cause increases in an individual's performance as compared to when they are not being observed-a phenomenon called 'social facilitation'. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this effect, in the context of skilled-task performance for monetary incentives, are not well understood. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor brain activity while healthy human participants performed a skilled-task during conditions in which they were paid based on their performance and observed and not observed by an audience. We found that during social facilitation, social signals represented in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) enhanced reward value computations in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC).We also found that functional connectivity between dmPFC and ventral striatumwas enhanced when participants exhibited social facilitation effects, indicative of a means by which social signals serve tomodulate brain regions involved in regulating behavioral motivation. These findings illustrate how neural processing of social judgments gives rise to the enhanced motivational state that results in social facilitation of incentive-based performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3D virtual worlds ( VWs) enable perception of others' presence and actions. However, it is unclear how this influences behaviors in group tasks. We study the influence of 'perceived colocation' and 'perceived coaction', on cognitive absorption, which in turn predicts participative behaviors. Perceived colocation and coaction are central to social facilitation effects, tested primarily in face-to-face settings. We use distraction-conflict theory to explain how these may occur in VWs. Results from a quasi-experiment in Second Life support our hypotheses. We demonstrate the influence of perceived colocation and coaction and extend the applicability of social facilitation effects by incorporating the concept of cognitive absorption in VWs. We conclude with suggestions for the use of VWs for decision-making tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some animal species increase resource acceptance rates in the presence of conspecifics. Such responses may be adaptive if the presence of conspecifics is a reliable indicator of resource quality. Similarly, these responses could represent an adaptive reduction in choosiness under high levels of scramble competition. Although high resource quality and high levels of scramble competition should both favor increased resource acceptance, the contexts in which the increase occurs should differ. In this paper, we tested the effect of social environment on egg-laying and aggressive behavior in the walnut fly, Rhagoletis juglandis, in multiple contexts to determine whether increased resource acceptance in the presence of conspecifics was better viewed as a response to increased host quality or increased competition. We found that grouped females oviposit more readily than isolated females when provided small (low-quality) artificial hosts but not when provided large (high-quality) artificial hosts, indicating that conspecific presence reduces choosiness. Increased resource acceptance was observed even when exposure to conspecifics was temporally or spatially separate from exposure to the resource. Finally, we found that individuals showed reduced aggression after being housed in groups, as expected under high levels of scramble competition. These results indicate that the pattern of resource acceptance in the presence of conspecifics may be better viewed as a response to increased scramble competition rather than as a response to public information about resource quality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]