Analyzing vigilance performance : task-type, feedback, and predictors

Abstract

Two vigilance tasks, monitoring and inspection, were employed in the examination of the effects of feedback and predictors (personality and cognitive) on vigilance performance measured through hits, decrement, and false-alarm rate. The tasks differed on several characteristics including the type of discrimination, complexity, and operational relevance. A repeated-measures design was utilized in which 68 university students participated in computer simulations of both tasks. Differences in performance on the two tasks reveal that complexity may hinder hit performance, but may mitigate vigilance decrement and false alarm rate. Results also suggest that the usefulness of personality and cognitive predictors of vigilance performance may be task specific. Findings provide insights into the implementation of countermeasures such as introducing an element of complexity on simple tasks (perhaps through artificial signal injection) and reducing complexity through training on the inspection task. Insight into the inconsistencies surrounding previous attempts at predicting vigilance performance and into the delivery of feedback on vigilance tasks with complex visual displays is also provided.