Motivation And Emotion In Sustained Attention

Introduction Energetic constructs have assumed a central place in theories of vigilance since Mackworth’s (1948) original demonstrations that the vigilance decrement is accentuated by sleep loss and countered by amphetamine. In early studies (see Davies and Parasuraman, 1982), the key energetic construct was nonspecific arousal. Vigilance tasks were seen as fatiguing assignments that induced suboptimal levels of arousal. Manipulations of motivation, such as providing knowledge of results to enhance performance, might also be seen in this light. More recent vigilance research emphasizes deployment of attentional resources as the principal explanatory construct (Warm, Dember, and Hancock, 1996; Warm, Parasuraman, and Matthews, 2008). Although perceptually simple and often monotonous, vigilance tasks impose high mental workloads, so that the challenge for the operator is to recruit adequate resources to meet sustained processing demands. In this chapter, we discuss the roles of two different kinds of motivational-affective factors in vigilance, from the perspective of the Warm et al. (1996, 2008) resource model. We focus especially on individual differences in motivation and emotion. One factor is related to subjective energy and tiredness. Measures of subjective energy and task engagement secured prior to performance predict subsequent perceptual sensitivity on a range of signal detection tasks (Matthews, Davies, and Lees, 1990; Matthews, Warm et al., 2010). Broadly, we can see subjective energy as a marker for resource availability