What Happens to Your Brain When You Know You’re Being Watched
upstart writes:
A new psychological study has shown that when people know they are under surveillance it generates an automatic response of heightened awareness of being watched, with implications for public mental health.
In a paper published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness psychology researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) worked with 54 participants to examine the effects of surveillance on an essential function of human sensory perception - the ability to detect another person's gaze.
Lead author, Associate Professor of neuroscience and Behaviour Kiley Seymour, said previous research has established the effects on conscious behavior when people know they are being watched, but the new study provided the first direct evidence that being watched also has an involuntary response.
"We know CCTV changes our behavior, and that's the main driver for retailers and others wanting to deploy such technology to prevent unwanted behavior," Associate Professor Seymour said.
"However, we show it's not only overt behavior that changes - our brain changes the way it processes information.
"We found direct evidence that being conspicuously monitored via CCTV markedly impacts a hardwired and involuntary function of human sensory perception - the ability to consciously detect a face.
"It's a mechanism that evolved for us to detect other agents and potential threats in our environment, such as predators and other humans, and it seems to be enhanced when we're being watched on CCTV.
[...] "We had a surprising yet unsettling finding that despite participants reporting little concern or preoccupation with being monitored, its effects on basic social processing were marked, highly significant, and imperceptible to the participants.
"The ability to rapidly detect faces is of critical importance to human social interactions. Information conveyed in faces, such as gaze direction, enables us to construct models of other people's minds and to use this information to predict behavior.
Journal Reference: "Big brother: the effects of surveillance on fundamental aspects of social vision" by Kiley Seymour, Jarrod McNicoll and Roger Koenig-Robert, 10 December 2024, Neuroscience of Consciousness. DOI: 10.1093/nc/niae039.
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