Examining the Automaticity of Ambient Awareness via Its Persistence Under Cognitive Load
Christine Anderl, Sonja Utz · Media Psychology · 2025
Knowing where expertise is in one’s network is essential for knowledge transfer and collaboration. Browsing social media can foster ambient awareness of who-knows-what. Although ambient awareness is defined by its automaticity, its persistence under cognitive constraints remains unexplored. In two preregistered experiments (Ntotal = 1,218), we tested whether people automatically infer others’ areas of expertise when browsing work-related social media updates even when distracted under conditions of cognitive load. The distractor tasks had high internal (Experiment 1: established tone-counting task) or external (Experiment 2: watching a video on a split screen) validity. We found that ambient awareness arising from browsing social media feeds persisted strongly in both experiments despite drains on cognitive resources imposed by the distractor tasks. Together, these results provide evidence for the effortless nature of ambient awareness.