The project will directly address the cognitive effects of the shifts to technology-mediated interactions during remote working, Since the COVID-19 related lockdown, professionals and students around the world started joining peers and colleagues for video calls, and running the video feed on the background, whilst working on personal, and often non-related projects. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people who engage in this working method report feeling less lonely, more productive, and more motivated to work. This phenomenon epitomises the rapidly emerging, technology-mediated ‘creative solutions’ to remain motivated and productive whilst working from home, which warrants the need for formal research. We intend to investigate the phenomenon of the social presence of others in an online video call and its impact on the cognitive performance of participants during co-presence. The social impact on cognitive performance will be tested within the well-established theoretical framework of the Social Facilitation Effect (SFE), where the presence of others facilitate or inhibit cognitive performance. The proposed experiment will test how cognitive performance changes when we are attentively observed by others and when others are merely co-present during the video chat, relative to when we perform alone. For ecological validity, the participants will be tested online from the comfort of their own homes, using a computer set-up that is habitual to their home-based work or study layout.