Citation

Neigel AR, Claypoole VL, Szalma JL. Acta Psychol. 2019; 197: 106-114.

Affiliation

University of Central Florida, Department of Psychology, College of Sciences, 4000 Central Florida Boulevard, Orlando, FL, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.05.007

PMID

31132570

Abstract

Vigilance, or sustained attention, is the ability to maintain attention for prolonged periods of time. Interestingly, to date, few studies on vigilance have focused on the role of state motivation in sustaining attention. To address this disparity in the literature, the present study examined the effect of two types of state motivation on vigilance performance across task types (cognitive or sensory) and across the number of displays (one, two, or four). A sample of 105 participants completed a 24-min overload or underload vigilance task in a research laboratory. Participants were randomly assigned to either a cognitive or sensory vigilance task, and were randomly assigned to monitor one, two, or four displays for target stimuli. The results indicated that intrinsic state motivation predicted correct detection performance and state success motivation predicted sensitivity, but not false alarm performance, response bias, or global workload. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical applications of this research.

Copyright © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Attention; Decision making; Human performance; State motivation; Vigilance