Vigilance on the move: video game- based measurement of sustained attention

    Authors

    J. L. Szalma; T. N. Schmidt; G. W. L. Teo;P. A. Hancock

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    Ergonomics

    Keywords

    vigilance; sustained attention; video games; monitoring; workload; SUBJECTIVE WORK MONOTONY; INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES; PERFORMANCE; STRESS; TASK; DECREMENT; FRAMEWORK; DISTRESS; MODEL; METAANALYSIS; Engineering, Industrial; Ergonomics; Psychology, Applied; Psychology

    Abstract

    Vigilance represents the capacity to sustain attention to any environmental source of information over prolonged periods on watch. Most stimuli used in vigilance research over the previous six decades have been relatively simple and often purport to represent important aspects of detection and discrimination tasks in real-world settings. Such displays are most frequently composed of single stimulus presentations in discrete trials against a uniform, often uncluttered background. The present experiment establishes a dynamic, first-person perspective vigilance task in motion using a video-game environment. 'Vigilance on the move' is thus a new paradigm for the study of sustained attention. We conclude that the stress of vigilance extends to the new paradigm, but whether the performance decrement emerges depends upon specific task parameters. The development of the task, the issues to be resolved and the pattern of performance, perceived workload and stress associated with performing such dynamic vigilance are reported.

    Journal Title

    Ergonomics

    Volume

    57

    Issue/Number

    9

    Publication Date

    1-1-2014

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    1315

    Last Page

    1336

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000340884200004

    ISSN

    0014-0139

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