Vigilance Latencies to Aircraft Detection among NORAD Surveillance Operators

Abstract

A function of North American Aerospace Defence (NORAD) in North Bay, Ontario, is to identify all aircraft entering Canadian airspace. The first step in performing this task is to detect visually the presence of aircraft from either radar or transponder information presented on display consoles. This challenging, real-world vigilance task was used to investigate factors affecting detection latencies. The experiment revealed that performance varied as a function of geographic area of coverage, the midnight shift was particularly sensitive to vigilance decrements, and a vigilance decrement effect can occur in a real-world task, but this effect is not as strong as those reported in laboratory studies.