Vigilance Tasks: Unpleasant, Mentally Demanding, and Stressful Even When Time Flies

To determine whether perceived time progression (PTP) moderates participants' negative reactions to vigilance tasks.

Vigilance tasks are rated by participants to be unenjoyable and as having high levels of workload and stress. Based on the adage, "You are having fun when time flies," we tested the possibility that accelerating PTP might reduce these negative experiences.

Two studies were performed, involving a long 30-min and a short 12-min vigil. We manipulated participants' PTP by creating a mismatch between their expectations about how long they would perform the task and the actual time that they were engaged.

PTP was significantly faster for participants who were led to expect that the vigilance task would last longer than it did relative to those led to expect that task duration would be shorter than it actually was and for controls for whom task duration was equal to the expected duration. However, accelerating PTP had no effect in either experiment on undesirable reactions to the vigilance tasks. Participants uniformly rated both tasks as unenjoyable, as having a high level of workload, and as stressful. Apparently, vigilance isn't fun even when time flies.

Our findings greatly underscore the depth to which negative subjective reactions are embedded in the nature of vigilance tasks and therefore that these tasks can have potentially serious costs to participants in terms of health, safety, and productivity.

These costs must be considered at the operational level.