Reducing Vigilance Decrement During Vigilance Tasks

The two sources used in the essay are For Better or for Worse: The Marriage of Science and Government in the United States and The war in the Pacific: From Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay by Harry A. Gailey will be evaluated for their purpose, value, and limitations. The essay focuses on how the developments of the radar affected the naval radar use by US during World War II. I will discuss how the ideas of the radar came about in Europe and later moved to the US. The essay consists of analysis of how it was used to aid the US on the battlefield against the Japanese and how it was developed

Sustained attention, also termed as vigilance, is an ability to focus on a stimulus for the span of a cognitive task. (Warm, Parasuraman, & Matthews, 2008). Many ordinary behaviours require continuous concentration for more than a few seconds and therefore rely on sustaining attention over time. For example, deficiency in sustaining attention are the most common reasons for railway accidents to happen (Edkins & Pollock,

Also, our arousal will only last for a certain amount of time, our attention can easily be distracted from our current task to something else. Vigilance is being about to keep your attention on one thing for a long period of time, regardless of different distractions. For example, when I’m reading a weekly lesson I can only process so much information at once (attention) before I get distracted by something else. However, when I’m taking a test, I have to be able to focus my attention on that test for a good stretch of time

This paper examines five different sources of information that addresses information pertaining to wakeful resting or sleeping and the effects it has on memory garnered by experiments performed on humans and animals. Wakeful resting is defined as an individual that has not fallen asleep but has engaged in a period of rest that cuts them off from the distractions of the outside world. Sleep is the bodies natural cycle of rest that suspends the consciousness and allows both the body and the mind to take a break from any stressful activities and recover. By either taking a short wakeful rest or going to sleep after learning new material, memory consolidation in both humans and animals will be improved, and it is not limited to humans that

The media affects children by shortening their attention span drastically. How the media affects children is because of the way the editors edit their works. The media is very fast paced and constantly cutting scenes which shorten children’s attention span. It is harmful to younger children because of how fast paced media produce their content.

The Computer Memory Interference Test (CMIT) is a test that is designed to evaluate how memory is affected by a myriad of different variables. With results from this test, scientists are able to determine if an individual has a serious memory disorder such as Alzheimer’s, or other cognitive disorders such as Autism. This test can also determine how memory is affected by different cultures and lifestyles. This study will concentrate on lifestyle; more specifically, it will focus on the effect of lack of sleep on memory. Lack of sleep is a topic that interests many scientists because sleep is a necessary tool to keep the brain functioning correctly. It is known that sleep is essential for the brain to be able to process, recall and maneuver episodic and semantic information (Alberca-Reina E, Cantero JL, & Atienza M, 2015). Many scientists have asked themselves if lack of sleep can affect an individual’s memory in their everyday life and with this, some concerns have been raised. For the average person, the effect of lack of sleep on their memory could simply be a nuisance, but for others it could be a matter of life or death. For example, individuals with demanding, high-pressure jobs usually don’t get sufficient sleep and normally these jobs are extremely important such as doctors, pilots, police officers, lawyers etc. For this reason, it is crucial to determine to what extent lack of sleep affects memory and therefore performance. Thanks to the CMIT, a

The purpose of this study is to find out if Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Dialectal Behavior Therapy (DBT) are equally effective in decreasing substance use in individuals with substance use disorders. Individuals that suffer from trauma are more likely to have substance use problems (Rizvi, Dimeff, Skutch, Carroll & Linehan, 2011). There is an 80% drop out rate for those who suffer from substance use that use treatment as usual. If both EMDR and DBT are equally effective to decrease substance use with those who suffer from trauma then this could open up for more research for other areas for those who have substance use but do not suffer from a trauma background (Martin, Langenbucher, Chung & Sher,

Kimble, M. O., Fleming, K., & Bennion, K. A. (2013). Contributors to hypervigilance in a military and civilian sample. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 28(8), 1672-1692. doi: 10.1177/0886260512468319

For this study, 25 people with and 25 people without sleep problems were tested on overnight sleep patterns and working memory tasks. During the overnight sleep period, the group with insomnia got about 6 hours of sleep and the group without insomnia averaged 7 hours. The memory task occurred while the brain was being scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). People with insomnia showed less activity in working memory regions and people without showed more. As the task got harder, people without insomnia showed more activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and less for people with insomnia (Rettner,2013). With the increased difficulty of the tasks, the group without were able to control their mind wandering and the group with insomnia were not

It is difficult to constantly get sufficient sleep due to work and family related circumstances, and an estimated 15-30% of traffic accidents are directly related to driver drowsiness (Howard, Jackson, Kennedy, Swann, Barnes & Pierce, 2007). Sleep deprivation has been demonstrated to strongly impair mood, cognitive performance, and motor function as a result of decreasing mental impairment (Durmer & Dinges, 2005). Therefore, it will be argued that sleep deprivation substantially interferes with driving performance. This is based on the evidence given by Williamson and Feyer (2005) which found that after long periods without sleep, driving performance reached equivalent to those

Vigilance is the ability to hold concentration and is defined as the ability to support concentrated attention over extended lengths of time. Vigilance decrement is the decline of vigilance over time and is shown by a drop in the rate of the correct detection of signals. The participants spent over six minutes completing a straightforward task, they reported the rare occasions where a dot would appear further from the middle cross marker then the more commonly appearing dots. This is a typical vigilance task. This task does not require large amounts of intelligence, but we would anticipate an increasing vigilance decrement the longer the participant continues in the test.

At some point in our lives, we will know someone who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD. The stigma associated with this disorder ranges anywhere from people who can’t keep down a job to children who can’t focus or listen at school (Hartmann, T. & Lavallee, V., 2007). I even grew up with two brothers who were diagnosed with ADHD and six years ago I had a kindergarten teacher tell me that she suspected my daughter had ADHD. So ADHD has been a subject that stands near and dear to my heart. It is no wonder that I wanted to investigate as much concerning this disorder as I could. Through my search for a deeper insight on the different aspects of ADHD I discovered an inattentional blindness study involving college students diagnosed

There are many factors that could potentially have an impact on an individual’s performance on cognitive function assessments. Sleep is one of the factors that impact the way an individual performs everyday tasks. Being fully rested and having a full night’s rest give individuals the ability to make clear decisions, allow them to solve complex problems and comprehend the world around them. Sleep deprivation, on the other hand, hinders people by not allowing them to think about their options and by making it harder for them to focus on the task at hand.

Studies on vigilance and sustained attention have been a widely studied part of psychology since the Second World War. This is because it was found that people monitoring radars for enemy ships experienced what is now known as vigilance decrement. That is when the ability of a subject to detect an abnormality during a task which primarily displays a “normal” screen. In the case of WWII radar monitors, this was to detect when an enemy submarine entered the radar. (Helton, W. S. & Russell, P. N. (2012). ) After a short time, typically 20-30 minutes but in certain cases as little as 5 minutes, vigilance decrement can occur. (Caggio, D. M., & Parasuraman, R. (2004)). There are two main theories commonly cited to explain this phenomenon, mindless theory and resource theory. Resource theory says that the vigilance decrement is due to the exhaustion of brain resources required to maintain focus on the task. Mindless theory simply explains vigilance depletion as being caused by disengagement from the task due to boredom. (Helton, W. S. & Russell, P. N. (2012).) The two theories explain the same phenomenon much differently; resource theory says it’s caused in part by cognitive overload, while mindless theory suggests it’s caused by cognitive under-load causing boredom. (Helton, W. S., & Russell, P. N. (2015)). Resource theory is strongly supported by a wide array of evidence from behavioural studies, mental workload studies, and brain imaging studies. When the

Vigilance is defined as the action or state of being alert and watchful. It is concerned both with what is and what will be. Thus it is important to be Vigilant in the army for many reasons. Not the least of which being it could keep you and your buddies alive despite the world’s best attempts to make you otherwise. But it means more than just staying awake and alert at guard duty. It means both being mentally and physically prepared to react to changing conditions and to being aware and cognizant of the current conditions. There are three important categories to discuss here and expound upon. The First is Vigilance