Examining the Role of Task Requirements in the Magnitude of the Vigilance Decrement.

Daniel Gartenberg,Shiva Hassanzadeh-Behbaha,Glenn Gunzelmann,J. Gregory Trafton

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01504

Abstract

The vigilance decrement in sustained attention tasks is a prevalent example of cognitive fatigue in the literature. A critical challenge for current theories is to account for differences in the magnitude of the vigilance decrement across tasks that involve memory (successive tasks) and those that do not (simultaneous tasks). The empirical results described in this paper examine this issue by comparing performance, including eye movement data, between successive and simultaneous tasks that require multiple fixations to encode the stimulus for each trial. The findings show that differences in the magnitude of the vigilance decrement between successive and simultaneous tasks were observed only when a response deadline was imposed in the analysis of reaction times. This suggests that memory requirements did not exacerbate the deleterious impacts of time on task on the ability to accurately identify the critical stimuli. At the same time, eye tracking data collected during the study provided evidence for disruptions in cognitive processing that manifested as increased delays between fixations on stimulus elements and between encoding the second stimulus element and responding. These delays were particularly pronounced in later stages of encoding and responding. The similarity of the findings for both tasks suggests that the vigilance decrement may arise from common mechanisms in both cases. Differences in the magnitude of the decrement arise as a function of how degraded cognitive processing interacts with differences in the information processing requirements and other task characteristics. The findings are consistent with recent accounts of the vigilance decrement, which integrate features of prior theoretical perspectives.

Highlights

Power plant workers, baggage handlers, air traffic controllers, military personnel, and pilots all have jobs that require maintaining attention for prolonged periods of time and detecting relatively rare, but critical, events or stimuli
We used a novel task paradigm to ensure that participants in the successive and simultaneous task conditions had to look at two stimuli to make a critical judgment, and we implemented a thresholding procedure to ensure that the stimulus presentation times were equated across task type conditions based on the information processing requirements
When comparing the first stage of processing with the second stage of processing, consistent with the previous results, there was an effect of task type where participants were slower in the successive task condition than the simultaneous task condition, F(1,49) = 9.67, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.20, there was an effect of block where more slowing occurred as block progressed, F(1,49) = 6.37, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.13, and there was no interaction between task type and block, F(1,49) = 0.04, p = 0.85, η2 = 0.00

Summary

Introduction

Baggage handlers, air traffic controllers, military personnel, and pilots all have jobs that require maintaining attention for prolonged periods of time and detecting relatively rare, but critical, events or stimuli. As a result, they all rely fundamentally on sustained attention, or vigilance. Sustained attention tasks put pressure on the human cognitive system This is not because the tasks themselves are complex or difficult to perform. Instead, it is the maintenance of attention on a relatively mundane or monotonous task that creates the difficulty, leading to performance degradation over time. A substantial empirical literature has demonstrated that the magnitude of the vigilance decrement is impacted by a variety of task factors, including the stimulus presentation time, the degree of memory involved in the task, stimulus presentation rate, and sensory modality (see Davies and Parasuraman, 1982 for a review)

Methods

Results

Conclusion