Sex of an Observer Effects on Adults' Motor, Cognitive, and Affective Dart-Shooting Performance.

Men and women are characterized by specific physiological, cerebral and emotional characteristics, as well as by the differing nature of their gestures and behaviors. Here, we examined the effects of an observer's sex on motor, cognitive and affective behaviors during dart-shooting. We compared men and women's kinematic and affective parameters when perfoming alone or when performing in the presence of an observer of a different sex. We found a sex effect on motor and cognitive performance in interaction with participants' emotional states. We observed improved accuracy and reaction time in men compared to women, which we attributed to (a) differences in emotional sensitivities between the two sexes and (b) men's superiority on precision tasks linked to men's higher proportion of cerebral white matter. Our findings also suggested a sex difference in the social effect of an observer's sex on motor and cognitive performance. Although there was no effect on affective aspects of performance, emotional state seemed to interact strongly with this social effect.

Effect of Social Context on Cognitive and Motor Behavior: A Systematic Review.

Human cognitive and motor behavior is influenced by the social contexts. The aim of this systematic review is to investigate the impact of the social contexts on human behaviors. A systematic search of the literature was performed via Pub-Med/Medline, Web of sciences, Google scholar, Science direct, Springer-Link and EMBASE and 68 articles were selected. After applying all the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 16 articles were retained. The results show that the presence of other people and the social context influence motor behavior (i.e. movement duration, trajectory behavior, maximum speed) and cognitive behavior (reaction time). Studies have shown an improvement in performance in the presence of other people compared to the individual situation. However, other studies showed that the presence of other people led to deterioration in performance compared to the individual situation. The improvement of behavior is attributed to the social phenomenon of facilitation while the deterioration was explained by the conduct theory or the distraction conflict theory. These social phenomena of facilitation or inhibition could be related to the perception-action theory, which interferes with interaction with other. This, in turn, seems to be associated with neural circuits of mirror neurons and motor system.