Vigilance phenomena, cognitive workload, and fatigue.

Abstract

Comments on the original record by Hancock (see record 2012-28202-001) regarding the problem of iatrogenically created psychological phenomena. This comment offers a solution to two of the problems that Hancock identified in his integrative review of vigilance research. First, the performance decrement over time that can set in within a half hour of performing a vigilance task in the laboratory is much less likely to occur in real-world conditions; performance improvements have also been noted. Second, a paradigm shift in the framing of questions and experimental designs is probably required to further research on these phenomena, which appear to grow in complexity (Hancock, 2013, p. 107).

Finding vigilance through complex explanations for complex phenomena.

“…Guastello (2014, this issue) offered a sympathetic, meaningful, and potentially explanatory account of several of the issues I raised in my recent article (Hancock, February–March 2013). My purpose here is to evaluate his offered hypotheses and to see where this intriguing line of development might lead in terms of theoretical and practical understanding of the critical real-world capacity of vigilance.…”

“…In short, not only do I agree that the cusp catastrophe approach holds particular promise as a potential descriptive explanation, but I also concur that we are beginning to be able to provide some precise mathematical quantifications to what began initially as an intriguing qualitative description. Guastello's (2014) linkage between vigilance and cognitive workload is not a new one (see Warm, Dember, & Hancock, 1996). Indeed, the origin of the proposition that vigilance actually represents a high level of cognitive demand was first promulgated by Hancock and Warm (1989), who made an explicit contrast with the thenexisting account that vigilance represented a boring, underdemanding task.…”

“…With respect to the specific application of such nonlinear dynamical approaches to vigilance, also in earlier work my colleague the late Jim Pierce and I were able to plot the four dimensions of signal detection (SDT) outcome (i.e., hit, miss, correct rejection, and false alarm) using the selfsame model shown in Guastello’s (2014) >Figure 1. We used the response times for each of the four SDT dimensions derived from the particular and perhaps unique data set of Parasuraman and Davies (1976).…”

“…When Pierce and I subsequently plotted the derived response time surface, it suggested that there are formal sequential dependencies in the stream of vigilance in which the propensities for hit, miss, false alarm, and correct rejection, respectively, follow lawfully upon one another, contingent, of course, also on the stream of objective stimuli presented. These sequential dependencies can be modeled approximately as a cusp catastrophe (see Guastello, 2014, Figure 1). In the case of vigilance, in which the vast number of responses prove to be correct rejections of nontarget events, the response time goes down (i.e., improves) across the period on watch, whereas for false alarms, the complement of correct rejections, the response time increases (i.e., degrades).…”

“…Guastello’s (2014) linkage between vigilance and cognitive workload is not a new one (see Warm, Dember, & Hancock, 1996). Indeed, the origin of the proposition that vigilance actually represents a high level of cognitive demand was first promulgated by Hancock and Warm (1989), who made an explicit contrast with the then-existing account that vigilance represented a boring, underdemanding task.…”