Collaborative Research: Understanding Why Vigilance Declines Over Time

行李检查、军事监视和长途驾驶等任务需要人们长时间保持专注和专注。但是保持注意力是很困难的，人们经常在开始一项单调任务的半小时或更短的时间内就开始犯错误。这个项目将行为实验与统计建模相结合，以确定人们在需要持续关注的任务时所犯的错误类型，并了解错误的原因。在高保真驾驶模拟器中进行的实验检验了自动车辆控制对驾驶员持续注意力的影响。其他行为实验研究了降低人们保持专注能力的因素。该项目培养实验心理学、认知建模和人因工程方面的研究生和本科生。研究结果有助于开发提高人类在持续注意力任务中的表现的技术，比如提供休息和恢复的机会，或者减少分心的机会。监测和监视任务具有挑战性，作业人员的性能在半小时或更短的时间内就会下降。这种下降被称为“警惕性下降”。尽管多年的研究和这一主题的明确重要性，潜藏在警惕性下降的过程仍然是争论的主题。该项目使用新颖的实验和分析方法来确定警戒失败的性质和原因。中心目标是分离反应偏差、内部加工噪声和注意缺失在警觉性衰减中的作用。为此，该项目分析了心理测量函数，显示信号检测率任务作为信号强度函数的曲线，并通过直接对应于偏差，噪声和失效率的参数进行描述。该项目研究了警觉性下降的形式如何随着被认为会影响持续注意力的任务特征而变化，包括任务难度、精神休息、刺激信息格式和双任务负载。在实验室任务和模拟驾驶任务中检查性能。该项目提供了经验数据，以解决长期以来关于警惕性下降机制的争论，并提供了实验方法和分析工具，以实现未来的警惕性研究。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Tasks such as baggage screening, military surveillance, and long-haul driving require people to remain focused and attentive over long periods of time. But sustaining attention is difficult and people often start making errors within a half hour or less of starting a monotonous task. This project combines behavioral experiments with statistical modeling in order to determine the kinds of errors people make when the task requires sustained attention and to understand the causes of the errors. Experiments in a high-fidelity driving simulator examine the ways that automated vehicle control affects drivers’ sustained attention. Other behavioral experiments examine factors that reduce people's ability to remain attentive. The project trains graduate and undergraduate students in experimental psychology, cognitive modeling, and human factors engineering. Findings help develop techniques for improving human performance in sustained attention tasks, like providing opportunities for rest and recovery or reducing opportunities for distraction.Monitoring and surveillance tasks are challenging, and operators’ performance drops over the course of 1/2 hour or less. This decline is termed the "vigilance decrement." Despite many years of research and the clear importance of this topic, the processes underlying the vigilance decrement remain the subject of debate. This project uses novel experimental and analytic methods to identify the nature and causes of vigilance failures. The central goal is to isolate the roles of response bias, internal processing noise, and attentional lapses on the vigilance decrement. To do this, the project analyzes psychometric functions, curves that display signal detection rates task as a function of signal intensity, and are described by parameters that directly correspond to bias, noise, and lapse rate. The project examines how the form of the vigilance decrement varies with task characteristics that are believed to influence sustained attention, including task difficulty, mental rest, stimulus information format, and dual-task load. Performance is examined in laboratory tasks and in a simulated driving task. The project delivers empirical data to resolve longstanding debates on the mechanisms of the vigilance decrement, and provides experimental methods and analytic tools to enable future vigilance research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.