Is surveillance changing how we see the world?

We're monitored everywhere these days; mobile phone trackers, front-facing cameras on every device, internet history, and now AI grabbing our data from all angles, to give a few examples. As Kiley Seymor and colleagues from across Australia and Germany point out in a recent paper, with the exploration of neural interfaces progressing, there's the very sci-fi possibility that one day, even our thoughts may be surveilled.

Despite this advancement of surveillance, our understanding of its impact on humans hasn't really advanced at the same pace. Seymor and colleagues' latest work, published recently in Neuroscience of Consciousness, takes some initial steps towards plugging that gap.

Past investigations have highlighted the effect of being watched on several voluntary behaviours. For example, having an audience makes people more prosocial; they're more giving, and less likely to cheat, drop litter, or look at provocative imagery. Beyond social behaviour, it also increases feeling of discomfort, vigilance, and can even have negative impacts on attention and working memory.

Seymor et al.'s work, however, focuses firmly on the involuntary effects of being watched, particularly as they pertain to perceptual awareness and cognition. The team hypothesised that feeling surveilled may make the visual system more sensitive to recognising when we are being gazed at.

To investigate this, they recruited 54 undergraduates for an in-person experiment. Thirty of these participants were assigned to the experimental group, who were shown cameras being set up in their experimental booth prior to testing, as well as a live feed of the booth in an adjoining room. The remaining 24 served as controls, who weren't subject to this surveillance theatre, but were left alone to complete a task in a camera-less booth.

In this space, all participants completed a 'breaking continuous flash suppression' task, which entailed watching a screen on which face stimuli, either gazing towards or away from them, were briefly flashed. Their mission was to press a button as quickly and accurately as possible to report whether a face was shown on the left or right of the screen. This reaction time was used as a measure for how quickly the face stimuli reached conscious perception, and therefore a measure of whether faces were being prioritised by the visual system under different surveillance circumstances.

Afterwards, participants completed questionnaires assessing both state and trait anxiety, and reported whether or not they felt watched during their performance, for good measure. In the experimental group, all felt mildly watched (as did most of the control group, which is consistent with previous research). They also reported that they felt this didn't affect their performance.

That gut feeling, however, wasn't reflected in the data. In fact, participants in the watched group perceived faces significantly faster than non-watched controls – by almost one full second - both when faces were gazing directly at them, or had their gaze averted.

The watched group were also more accurate in detecting which side they'd seen faces. Both of these findings support the idea that, when we feel like someone is watching us, we're quicker to perceive faces. The accuracy finding, in particular, also rules out the idea that there'd be some sort of speed-accuracy trade-off for this boost.

Analysis of the anxiety measures found that there was no change in anxiety levels pre- to post- experiment. Both groups matched in levels of trait anxiety, meaning that these results can't be explained by nerves alone. A second control study conducted by the team using neutral, non-face stimuli suggested that demand characteristics were also not to blame, and that not all stimuli benefitted from a perceptual boost when participants were watched. 

These findings would seem to indicate that knowing we're being surveilled affects involuntary cognitive processes, influencing how we perceive, understand, and interact with the world around us – despite likely feeling as though it doesn't affect us. This "imperceivable" influence, as the authors put it, could plausibly be having a quiet effect on the wider public's mental health, attention, and performance. Further investigations, however, will be needed to assess those risks.

Read the paper in full:
Seymour, K., McNicoll, J., & Koenig-Robert, R. (2024). Big brother: the effects of surveillance on fundamental aspects of social vision. Neuroscience of Consciousness, (1), niae039. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niae039

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