The cognitive energetics of sustained attention: Ability, desire, or both?

In the cognitive-energetic framework, both goal activation and goal maintenance are important for successfully sustaining attention over time. There are multiple factors that can possibly contribute to maintaining goals and persisting with vigilance as time on task increases, like capacity and motivation. In this study, we use a latent growth model to track individual differences in sustained attention performance on the psychomotor vigilance task on two levels: initial reaction time and the linear slope in reaction time, or the vigilance decrement. We identify how individual differences in the vigilance decrement are predicted by both the ability to activate and maintain a goal, operationalized as capacity derived from four working memory tasks, and the desire to activate and maintain a goal, operationalized as both mean self-reported motivation and change in motivation from the beginning to the end of the task. We found that ability (working memory) and desire (motivation) were unrelated, and they each predicted unique variance in sustained attention performance over time. Working memory negatively predicted initial performance and the vigilance decrement, change in motivation negatively predicted initial performance, and mean motivation negatively predicted the vigilance decrement. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).