Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive interference is a classic cognitive phenomenon:processing one stimulus while ignoring another is morechallenging when the two are related. Recently, andsurprisingly, it has been shown that an individual’s cognitiveinterference can be removed by the people around them. In thepicture-word interference paradigm, participants respond to atarget picture and ignore distractor words. If the words aresemantically related to the target, interference slows responses.We found that this cognitive interference was removed, orsocially offloaded, when participants believed that they wereworking together with another person. In contrast to previousstudies we found it did not matter if the other person workedon the distractor words or on task irrelevant, coloured squares.Furthermore, the time course of this effect suggests that thesocial offloading of semantic interference is underpinned bylate inhibitory mechanisms rather than early distractor filtering.