Rest Is Still Best

We examined the impact task interruptions of differing qualitative and quantitative load have on visuospatial vigilance sensitivity.

The vigilance decrement and attempts to develop countermeasures to the decrement is one of the most important human factors issues. There is an ongoing debate between those who interpret the increase in the rate of failures to detect signals over time as being due to objective task monotony or task underload and those who interpret this increased failure proneness as being predominately due to cognitive-resource depletion and task overload.

Participants were assigned at random to one of six interruptions: Participants were given a complete rest (rest); participants completed a 1-back verbal working-memory (WM) task, a 3-back verbal WM task, a 1-back spatial WM task, or a 3-back spatial WM task; or participants performed the primary vigilance task (continuous).

Postinterruption performance was best for rest and worst for continuous. A resource theory perspective led us to make two possible predictions of relative interruption effect orders of the six conditions out of 720 possible orderings. We found one of the two orders.

Overall, the vigilance sensitivity decrement appears to be due to the recurring use of particular cognitive resources, and resource theorists should explore this more extensively in the future.

Countermeasures for the vigilance decrement should be based on clear cognitive-resource considerations. Rest is the best countermeasure. Intervening tasks should be chosen that minimize resource-demand overlap with the vigilance task.