Vigilance in a dynamic environment

Advances in technology have led to increasing levels of automation in modern work environments, moving people to the position of a passive monitor. When persons are in passive monitoring states, they are often subject to overall deficits in performance that become worse as time on task increases (i.e., vigilance decrements). Although many factors have been shown to influence whether or not a vigilance decrement will occur in a monitoring task (e.g., event rate), it is not clear how laboratory experiments translate to operational environments (Hancock, 2013). Four experiments were conducted that examined the effects of signal rate, event rate, cognitive load, training, and the presence of a dual task on performance during an air traffic control (ATC) automation failure detection task. Both failure detection and detection time were analyzed. Results from a meta-analysis revealed that cognitive load placed on participants through the use of task-relevant complex instructions produced a reliable vigilance decrement. However, other types of cognitive load did not produce any reliable vigilance decrements. The relationship of the cognitive load to the vigilance task may be an important factor in determining if the cognitive load will produce a vigilance decrement in a dynamic operational environment like air traffic control.