Psychometric Curves Reveal Three Mechanisms of Vigilance Decrement
通过贝叶斯层次模型分析视觉警觉任务的心理测量曲线，发现警觉性下降由反应偏向保守、感知灵敏度下降和注意力失误增多三种机制共同导致。
The vigilance decrement is a decline in signal detection rate that occurs over time on a sustained-attention task. The effect has typically been ascribed to conservative shifts of response bias and losses of perceptual sensitivity. Recent work, though, has suggested that sensitivity losses in vigilance tasks are spurious, and other findings have implied that attentional lapses contribute to vigilance failures. To test these possibilities, we used Bayesian hierarchical modeling to compare psychometric curves for the first and last blocks of a visual vigilance task. Participants were a convenience sample of 99 young adults. Data showed evidence for all three postulated mechanisms of vigilance loss: a conservative shift of response bias, a decrease in perceptual sensitivity, and a tendency toward more frequent attentional lapses. Results confirm that sensitivity losses are possible in a sustained-attention task but indicate that mental lapses can also contribute to the vigilance decrement.