Evaluating Vigilance In A Dynamic Environment: Methodological Issues And Proposals

Decades of vigilance research have contributed much to our understanding of the factors affecting sustained attention. However most of what we know about vigilance has been from studies employing tasks that involve relatively static stimuli presented on relatively uncluttered backgrounds. This bears little resemblance to many modern day vigilance tasks. The present study discusses the challenges and issues in applying the vigilance paradigm and methodology to a dynamic task requiring vigilance in an IED detection task. Copyright 2012 by Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Inc. All rights reserved