A puzzling situation: How cooperation and social observation influence visuospatial problem-solving
Abstract
Human problem-solving rarely occurs in social isolation. Yet how cognitive performance and subjective experiences vary across social situations, and whether these effects depend on individual differences in social anxiety (SA), remains underexplored. In this preregistered, within-subject experiment, 101 healthy young adults completed a visuospatial problem-solving task, involving tangram puzzles of different difficulty levels (1,818 trials total) across three social conditions: alone or joined by an experimental confederate acting as either a scrutinizing observer or an active cooperator. Using hierarchical Bayesian modeling, we modeled task performance and post-trial self-reported experiences, and tested whether SA, measured with the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale, moderated the effects of social condition. Both performance and self-report ratings were modulated by task difficulty and social condition. Relative to performing alone, being observed was associated with a decrease in the probability of success and higher post-trial anxiety. Cooperation facilitated performance and reduced perceived difficulty. Crucially, SA moderated the effect of cooperation on post-trial anxiety: cooperation produced the largest reduction in post-trial anxiety among participants with greater fear of being observed. This buffering effect was specific to social-evaluative fear rather than general trait anxiety or task performance. Our findings reinforce the view that cognitive performance and participants’ experiences are jointly shaped by the social context in which they occur.
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BibTeX
@misc{cassioli2026puzzling,
title = {{A puzzling situation: How cooperation and social observation influence visuospatial problem-solving}},
author = {Federico Cassioli and Nellia Bellaert and Mandy Rossignol and Clay Holroyd and Rudi de Raedt},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/54f8u_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/54f8u_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A puzzling situation: How cooperation and social observation influence visuospatial problem-solving
AU - Federico Cassioli
AU - Nellia Bellaert
AU - Mandy Rossignol
AU - Clay Holroyd
AU - Rudi de Raedt
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/28
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/54f8u_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/54f8u_v1/
AB - Human problem-solving rarely occurs in social isolation. Yet how cognitive performance and subjective experiences vary across social situations, and whether these effects depend on individual differences in social anxiety (SA), remains underexplored. In this preregistered, within-subject experiment, 101 healthy young adults completed a visuospatial problem-solving task, involving tangram puzzles of different difficulty levels (1,818 trials total) across three social conditions: alone or joined by an experimental confederate acting as either a scrutinizing observer or an active cooperator. Using hierarchical Bayesian modeling, we modeled task performance and post-trial self-reported experiences, and tested whether SA, measured with the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale, moderated the effects of social condition. Both performance and self-report ratings were modulated by task difficulty and social condition. Relative to performing alone, being observed was associated with a decrease in the probability of success and higher post-trial anxiety. Cooperation facilitated performance and reduced perceived difficulty. Crucially, SA moderated the effect of cooperation on post-trial anxiety: cooperation produced the largest reduction in post-trial anxiety among participants with greater fear of being observed. This buffering effect was specific to social-evaluative fear rather than general trait anxiety or task performance. Our findings reinforce the view that cognitive performance and participants’ experiences are jointly shaped by the social context in which they occur.
ER -