The capacity to sustain attention to virtual threat landscapes has led cyber security to emerge as a new and novel domain for vigilance research. However, unlike classic domains, such as driving and air traffic control and baggage security, very few vigilance tasks exist for the cyber security domain. Four essential challenges that must be overcome in the development of a modern, validated cyber vigilance task are extracted from this review of existent platforms that can be found in the literature. Firstly, it can be difficult for researchers to access confidential cyber security systems and personnel. Secondly, network defense is vastly more complex and difficult to emulate than classic vigilance domains such as driving. Thirdly, there exists no single, common software console in cyber security that a cyber vigilance task could be based on. Finally, the rapid pace of technological evolution in network defense correspondingly means that cyber vigilance tasks can become obsolete just as quickly. Understanding these challenges is imperative in advancing human factors research in cyber security.CCS categoriesHuman-centered computing~Human computer interaction (HCI)~HCI design and evaluation methods.

This review identifies cerebral haemodynamic fluctuations characteristic of vigilance decrement, the tendency for lapses in sustained attention to snowball with time on task. These characteristic fluctuations, previously missed by existent literature, can be ascribed to a series of methodological and analytic confounds associated with the use of Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (FNIRS) to record regional tissue oxygen saturation (rSO2) over the anterior frontal lobes during sustained attention tasks. This review triangulates a sequence of changes in rSO2 characteristic of vigilance decrement, that maps to bio-cognitive models of the human attention system. Previous studies may not have been able to identify this characteristic sequence, because data was either not recorded for a sufficient amount of time or used bucket averaging analysis methods that obfuscated changes in rSO2. Lessons learned through this review may reinform FNIRS research methods and ultimately lead future researchers to design experiments that better leverage rSO2 as a measure of human attentional performance.

Declines in the capacity to sustain attention to repetitive, monotonous tasks is a phenomenon known as vigilance decrement (Endsley M, Kiris E. The out-of-the-loop performance problem and level of control in automation. 1995. Hum Factors. 37:32–64). This review compares cognitive theories with psycho-physiological models of vigilance decrement, and a gap is identified in mapping between the 2. That is, theories of vigilance decrement refer to “cognitive” resources; by contrast, psychophysiological models of the cerebral systems associated with attention explain performance functions according to neurochemical resources. A map does not currently exist in the literature that bridges the gap between cognitive theories of vigilance decrement and psychophysiological models of the human attention system. The link between “cognitive resource” theories of vigilance decrement and the psychophysiological models of attention performance is a gap in the literature that this review fills. This comprehensive review provides an expanded psychophysiological understanding of vigilance decrement that could help inform the management of declines in sustained attention capacity in operational settings. In addition, elucidating the link between cognitive theories of vigilance decrement and psychophysiological models of the human attention system might be used to treat and better understand pathologies such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.