REVIEW article
Front. Cognit.
Sec. Attention
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcogn.2025.1632885
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvances in Vigilance Research: Exploring Novel Theoretical Models and Analytical Approaches on the analysis of the Vigilance Decrement.View all 7 articles
The Vigilance Decrement: Its First 75 Years
Provisionally accepted
- Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
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The first major laboratory studies of vigilance by N. Mackworth (1948 and later) revealed a decline in the probability of detecting brief targets as the time-on-task increases. Whether referred to as a vigilance decrement or something else (e.g. a failure of sustained attention), because such failures have great applied significance (e.g., in road safety, radiology, air-traffic control, civil defence, etc.) understanding the vigilance decrement and discovering ways to avoid it are important goals for psychological science. The purpose of this historical review is to provide a picture of the extensive scientific literature exploring the nature(s) of the vigilance decrement, with an emphasis, but not exclusionary focus, on the signal detection theory framework. Beginning in the early 1960's researchers began to interpret this decline in target detections using signal detection theory, wherein, a decrease in detections can be attributed to a decrease in sensitivity of the observer to the difference between targets and non-targets or to a conservative shift in the observer's response criterion; or, of course, to both. Some early investigators suggested that which of these two causes of the decline in detections is operating may depend upon the rate at which events (targets and non-targets combined) are presented: When the event rate is slow, criterion shifts dominate detection failures, whereas declines in sensitivity become more pronounced as event rate increases. Nevertheless, the contribution of sensitivity declines has been recently challenged. One source of the challenge is the relatively low false alarm rate in so many studies of the vigilance decrement. Another is the possibility that the observer in a relatively long vigil may for any of a variety of reasons stop attending the source of the task-relevant signals. Some recommendations are offered based on our reading of the ~75 years of vigilance research.
Keywords: Criterion, Sensitivity, Signal detection theory, sustained attention, Watch keeping
Received: 21 May 2025; Accepted: 31 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Klein and Feltmate. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Raymond M Klein, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
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