Combating Vigilance Decrements in a Sustained Attention Task: Lack of Support for the Utility of a Cognitive Intervention Secondary Task

Abstract

Results from previous studies (St. John & Risser, 2007, 2009) indicate the addition of a simple cognitive secondary task may mitigate vigilance decrements for a sustained attention task involving target acquisition. The effectiveness of the cognitive task increased when its onset was triggered by physiological indicators of inattention. The current study examined the generalizability of this methodology with a few modifications. A no intervention condition was added to provide a baseline and a short perceptual vigilance task (AVT) was added to examine the construct validity of the experimental task (ET). Finally, instead of using physiological indicators to trigger the intervention, a schedule was used that resembled that of the physiological intervention. Although vigilance decrements were observed for both the AVT and ET, only a weak relationship was observed between the two tasks. ET performance was not affected by the cognitive intervention. The weak relationship between the AVT and ET scores suggests that they are not measuring the same constructs. Further, the failure to replicate previous findings casts doubts on the robustness of the cognitive intervention for mitigating performance decrements on real-world tasks, especially when its onset is not linked with physiological indicators of inattention.