The Effects of Event Rate on a Cognitive Vigilance Task

Objective: The present experiment sought to examine the effects of event rate on a cognitive vigilance task. Background: Vigilance, or the ability to sustain attention, is an integral component of human factors research. Vigilance task difficulty has previously been manipulated through increasing event rate. However, most research in this paradigm has utilized a sensory-based task, whereas little work has focused on these effects in relation to a cognitive-based task. Method: In sum, 84 participants completed a cognitive vigilance task that contained either 24 events per minute (low event rate condition) or 40 events per minute (high event rate condition). Performance was measured through the proportion of hits, false alarms, mean response time, and signal detection analyses (i.e., sensitivity and response bias). Additionally, measures of perceived workload and stress were collected. Results: The results indicated that event rate significantly affected performance, such that participants who completed the low event rate task achieved significantly better performance in terms of correction detections and false alarms. Furthermore, the cognitive vigil utilized in the present study produced performance decrements comparable to traditional sensory vigilance tasks. Conclusion: Event rate affects cognitive vigilance tasks in a similar manner as traditional sensory vigilance tasks, such that a direct relation between performance and level of event rate was established. Application: Cognitive researchers wishing to manipulate task difficulty in their experiments may use event rate presentation as one avenue to achieve this result.