The Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) has been widely used in psychological literature as a measure of vigilance (the ability to sustain attention over a prolonged period of time). This task uses a Go/No-Go paradigm and requires the participants to repetitively respond to the stimuli as quickly and as accurately as possible. Previous literature indicates that performance in SART is subjected to a "speed-accuracy trade-off" (SATO) resulting from strategy choices and from the failures of controlling motor reflexes. In this study, 36 participants (n = 36) performed a series of four SARTs. The results support the perspective of strategy choice in SART and suggest that within-subjects SATO in SART should also be acknowledged in attempting to explain SART performance. The implications of the speed-accuracy trade-off should be fully understood when the SART is being used as a measure or tool.

No abstract

Lastly, I would like to thank my friends and extended family who believed in me, motivated me, and who I turned to when I needed to have fun.

Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) have been shown to predict how well people perform tasks that require directed attention, but the individual differences responsible for task-set switching and noticing behaviors are less well understood. In this study, 86 undergraduate students from California State University, Northridge completed a measure of WMC, a measure of cognitive flexibility, and attempted to identify disappearing objects in change-blindness slides. WMC was not related to our measure of cognitive flexibility or change detection, but cognitive flexibility was directly correlated with the ability to notice change. The findings suggest that the ability to notice sudden changes in an environment, an ability that is of paramount importance for the safe operation of complex machinery and systems, may be supported by individual differences that are independent of WMC.

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is a general behavioral assessment that contains a myriad of dependent variables, each contributing to the overall assessment of executive function. In this paper, the authors explore the underlying ability that is measured by the variable failure to maintain set (FMS). Two opposing theories, cognitive flexibility and distractibility, are presented to determine what cognitive processes underlie failures to maintain set, and two analyses of archival data are presented. In analysis one, we analyzed data from a study where the WCST predicted creativity in participant constructions of Haiku poetry, but the analysis was not able distinguish whether FMS was predicting cognitively flexibility or distractibility. In analysis two, we analyzed data from a separate study where the WCST was used to predict vigilance in a divided attention task, and we detected that FMS inversely predicted vigilant performance. Our overall analysis suggests that FMS is an assessment of distractibility, not cognitive flexibility. We end with a discussion of the implications of our findings, and directions for future research.