What Happens When There are 3 States, a Habituation Issue and Mindedness Theory

This week there was a larger than usual amount of direct debate about the topic of vigilance decrement  The experimenters attempted to classify vigilance decrements according to the manner in which it affectes the individual, possible causes of the decrement and even ways the decrement can be avoided. However, as soon as these distinctions are made it becomes clear that there is a lot of potential conflict and disagreement. The main conflict is between thinking of a vigilance decrement as a Global Habituation Issues or as a Mindedness Issues. These two theories set a tone for the type of solution or possible help one might be able to extend an individual experiencing a vigilance decrement. At the same time it is possible that there is more to be gained by examining vigilance as a sequential set of "states." 

Researchers, Allan Cheyne, Grayden Solman, Jonathan Carriere,  and Daniel Smilek, published an article in 2009 entitled "Anatomy of an error: A bidirectional state model of task engagement/disengagement and attention-related errors." Both the title and the content of this article are very clear. The team of psychologists worked to create what they call a "three state attentional model of engagement/disengagement" (Cheyne et. al., 98). This is essentially a mode of classifying vigilance decrements. These researchers believe there is a trend among type of decrement. This is not a reference to the cause of the decrement per se but rather a comment on the quality of the weighing attention.

The three stages they propose are illustrated in the chart below. 

Cheyne et. al. are very clear that these there stages are discrete. One is one of the 3 stages never somewhere in between. Yet, there are two features of these theoretical stages that are particularly intriguing  First, experimental research as indicated that a person who falls into one of the states is much more biased to fall into or to have been in one of the others. This points us to the second interesting feature. Much in the same way light is both a particle and a wave, these stages are both discrete and lie on a continuum. A person completing a task will go through the stages in order starting with the first and -possibly - making it to the last. The shift may be quick but it must exist. The hypothesis that the three states are sequentially related is known as "Temporal Relations and Transitions Between States" (Cheyne, 103). 

The experimenters had three measures associated with each of the measures (included in the third column of the chart above. Each calculable measure is in a sense a proxy for the  experimenters expectation and theories regarding it's respective state.

A final interesting and particularly noteworthy point that these researchers made is the "Bidrectionality" of the wandering mind. This theory simply states that it is possible for a wandering mind to still be attending to a task that is being worked on. Even if the individual completely a task is not attending to the item or specific action which they are performing, it is possible that they are simply problem solving or perhaps even thinking ahead. A wandering mind is therefore not always a problem. It becomes problamatic when the item or issue being attended to is incredibly important. In  these cases a wandering mind, even in the interest of the task, may be incredible unhelpful (like driving a car while trying to figure out which exit is best for you to get off at. 

This issue struck me as particularly novel and facinating in terms of my previous study in the subject. The question of what the participants attention has been slipping towards has just not been a matter of question so far. Perhaps not everything that we've seen has been a vigilance decrement but more specifically problem solving with the intention of being vigilant? 

Atsunori Ariga, and Alejandro Lleras' article "Brief and rare mental ‘‘breaks’’ keep you focused: Deactivation and reactivation of task goals preempt vigilance decrements" and William Helton and Paul Russell's article "Brief mental breaks and content-free cues may not keep you focused" literally respond to the same issues. Both sets of researchers are trying to identify possible solutions to the vigilance decrememtn we are at this point sure exists and occurs consistently. The main issues that Helton et. al. have with Ariga et. al.  is that they believe there is a major confound in the experiment; mental load. 

In short, Ariga looks at vigilance decrement as a failure of the Cognitive control system NOT a brain resource replenishing issues. the cognitive control system must struggles to  keep the target looked for in the vigilance task active for extended periods of times. This is essentially known as the Global Habituation Theory. To test this theory Ariga et. al. had 4 group complete a task of detecting a short line when the general event was a longer line.

1) The control simply performed the vigilance task. 

2) The no switch condition memorized 4 numbers  at the onset of the experiment performed the vigilance task and was then asked to identify the memorize numbers once the vigilance task was completed. 

3) The switch condition memorized the 4 numbers, began the vigilance task, and was probed through out the vigilance task about the numbers memorized.  

4) The Digit Ignored group saw the same task as group 3, but memorized no numbers and was told to ignore the probing number signals that reoccured throughout the task.

The results indicated that having another task (ex: the switch condition) was much more beneficial for avoiding vigilance decrement than an of the other possibilities. Things soon become very complicated as Helton et. al. begin to unravel Ariga et. al.'s arguments. Helton reexplains the two theories (mindedness and global habituation) in his paper but he also explains them in terms of mental load; "under-load and overload" respectively (Helton et. al., 38). He believes that there is no way to resolve metal overload other than reducing the load. His problem with Ariga's article was that the statistics run. After tearing those apart he notes that Arigas's Switch condition adds an additional task and really increases the mental load of the participant. So rather than reduce vigilance decrement it in fact increases it.

Though both articles make valid points it is difficult to really weigh the results if one it to truse the statistical analysis that Helton has dont on the Ariga article. At the same time it seems that both researchers could take a page out of Cheyne's book and consider that the decrement that their participants are experiencing is not unnecessary. That perhaps mental load is not the cause of vigilance decrement but one of the results. Yes, there is the obvious chang ein mental load with a task that requires more memory storage and other similar factors, but if an individual allocates memory, space, and time to try and analyze their own decrements, like in a Stage 1 or Stage 2, they are increasing their own mental load. Perhaps it is impossible to really monitor when and if this occurs. Furthermore, the consequences of claiming that only reducing memory load is a valid solution to memory load induced vigilance decrements is to say that there is an entire field of people who's work cannot be made easier since decreasing memory load is not always, if ever, a real- life solution to a problem with a wandering mind.  

References: 

Ariga, Atsunori., Lleras, Alejandro. "Brief and rare mental 'breaks' keep you focused: Deactivation and reactivation of task goals preempt vigilance decrements". (2011). Cognition. 118: 439-443. 

Cheyne, J. Allan., Solman, Grayden J.F.,  Carriere, Jonathan S.A., Smilek, Daniel. "Anatomy of an error: A bidirectional state model of task engagement/disengagement and attention-related errors." (2009). Cognition. 111: 98-113. 

Helton, William S., Russell,  Paul N. "Brief mental breaks and content-free cues may not keep you focused." Brain Research. (2012). 219: 37-46. 

Sometimes A "Boring" Task Is Just Too Hard

One of the aspects of vigilance and attention that I became most curious about after last week's readings was the extent to which an individuals physical ability to attend to a stimulus played a role in their decline of accurate stimulus responses. This is to say that there may be a physiological change that influences vigilance.

This weeks readings, to some extent, addressed that very issue.

In his article "Memory Load and Event Rate Control Sensitivity", Dr. Raja Parasuraman notes that individuals' ability to accurately detect targets is accompanied by a lowering in their false detection rates. This means they miss the target they are supposed to be attending to (have more misses) but also make fewer false ID's (have fewer fasle positives). Parasuraman believes this is due to one of two factors, "a deterioration in the observer's ability to discriminate targets from non targets or to a response process in which the observer becomes more cautious about reporting a target with time" (Parasuraman, 1979). The former is a perceptual sensitivity issues while the latter is an issue relating to an individuals' response criteria.
Parasuraman also identifies two aspects of an activity that can influence an individuals' perceptual sensitivity:

1) The manner in which the discrimination task is presented to the participant

If the activity involves the participant identifying a target that is presented at the same time as the baseline event (simultaneous discrimination task) he or she will be more successful.





If the activity relies on using memory to identify and report a stimulus a (known as a successive discrimination task) a participant will have a harder time identifying that stimulus as the target that he or she is looking for.

2) The rate at which the events in the discrimination task occur. 
The higher the even rate the bigger the individuals decline in vigilance.

Dr. Parasuraman compares the results of his own experiment (which sustain his hypotheses) with the results of 27 other studies involving vigilance. His meta analysis (which again support his hypotheses) breaks the findings down into the chart below (from Parasuarman, 1979) which distinguishes between successive and simultaneous discrimination, the event rates, whether a sensitivity decrement was present and a few other factors.

Paraduarman's results were very influential in the study of vigilance and have since led to many new theories on vigilance.  Psychologists Judi See, Stephen Howe, Joel Warm, and William Dember, published an article in 1995 entitles "Meta-Analysis of the Sensitivity Decrement in Vigilance" examining some of the most influential studies done to date. 

The primary offering of this article is the notion of sensory vigilance and cognitive vigilance. See et. al. noticed that in most previous studies there was no distinction made between tasks that required sensory attention from participants and those that asked for cognitive vigilance. They realized that this seemingly small distinction is actually rather significant and a "crucial element in the occurrence of sensitivity decrements in vigilance" (See et. al. 1995). Interestingly they concluded that individuas are fundamentally more familiar with cognitive stimuli and can therefore make better judgements concerning things they are so familiar with. While this proposition is interesting I found myself confused by whether or not I properly understood what it meant. Thought it may be uncommon to have a sensory stimulus that one is as confident  and familiar with as a cognitive one, I do not believe it is impossible. Wouldn't an expert piano tuner be as comfortable making a call regarding an auditory stimulus as he would on say some cognitive task. Isn't there a point of expertise at which there is perhaps no distinction between these two things? And if so how is it possible that there is a sensitivity detriment in sensory tasks but not in cognitive ones?

The final article for the week "Vigilance Requires Hard Mental Work and Is Stressful" made very interesting claims about the nature of vigilance. Though people often say that a vigilance task is perhaps boring or unexciting or uneventful, evidence show that it is actually quite demanding.

This coclusion was obtained through the use of the NASA-TLX  scale (image to the left). It measures participant feedback on workload on 7 scales, "Mental Demand," "Physical Demand," "Temporal Demand," "performance," "Effort," and "Frustration." 

The other particularly interesting element of the study was the face that it concluded that the danger with human vigilance is that humans are actually not envolved enough in the vigilance tasks they are required to perform. Though the study remakes that "accidents ranging in scale from major to minor are often the result of vigilance failures on the part of human operators in semiautomated systems," the problem actually lies in the fact that machinery lessens the amount of attention that an indiviual feels he or shee needs to apply to the task at hand (Warm et. al. 2008).
Though this all seems logical it is, to some extent at odds with the previously stated fact that human beings actually find extended periods of vigilance stressful and anxiety causing.

After reading these articles I am also curious about the type of vigilance taks that these studies examine. Thought it is clear that there are restrictions on the types of experiments that can be run in a controlled and efficient manner, not all things that human beings attend to are necessarily boring. All these experiments test mandatory vigilance tasks. Even if not 100% mandatory and the participant can choose to terminate the task, it is not an activity that one would ever engage in for pleasure. Is there a difference in the way vigilance declines, if there is a decline at all, when an individual is attending to something of interest to them. A soccer referee looking for infractions or rule violations and a ballett teacher correcting her students as they do routine barre work and correcting their misalignments and erros are two such examples. In these cases, working on something that one might find pleasurable might automatically increase adrenaline levels, make the task more pleasant, and simultaneously decrease feelings of anxiety.




References:

Parasuraman, R. (1979). "Memory load and event rate control sensitivity

decrements in sustained attention." Science, 205, 924–927.

See, J. E., Howe, S. R., Warm, J. S., & Dember, W. N. (1995). "Meta-analysis of the       sensitivity decrement in vigilance." Psycho- logical Bulletin, 117, 230–249.

Warm, JS., Parasuraman R.,Matthews G. (2008). "Vigilance requires hard mental work and is stressful." Hum Factors, 50, 433-41.

Vigilance & Boredom

Questions regarding vigilance and how the human mind reacts to working on tasks that require their sustained attention for extended periods of time have long been on psychologists minds. As more research gets done it becomes apparent that the nature of attention and vigilance is not a simple and rudimentary as it may initially appear. We all know and have first-hand experience with working at a task that requires your full attention for an extended period of time and how that attention and focus seems to fade over time. The question that really needs to be answered is what the consequences of that fade and inattention are? How harmful is continuing to participate in a task once you are already board, after how much time is this true, and many more. 

  

Three scientific articles merit a side by side discussion on this topic: "What's so Boring About Vigilance?" by Mark W. Scerbo, "Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society" by Donald E. Broadbent and Margaret Gregory, and "Signal Detection Theory" by Professor David Heeger. The first text is a study of vigilance and boredom. Interestingly enough Scerbo discusses the lack of attention paid to the concept of "boredom" in psychological studies and proposes that more research be done to survey the nature of boredom how that affects what we tend to consider accurate and efficient task performance. He also questions whether the difficulty of the task has a measurable effect on individuals’ boredom and thus task performance. He states, "As the difficulty of the task increases, it required additional effort, which then produces higher levels of boredom" (Scerbo). While that proved to be untrue he additionally studied whether allowing individuals working on a task to relieve restlessness would decrease reported boredom, which had much more promising results. The "Human Factors: The Journal of theHuman Factors and Ergonomics Society" article focuses on an alternate understanding of why and in what way individuals fail at tasks once boredom has set in and that vigilance is waning. Broadbent and Gregory conclude that it has less to do with inability to detect the signals but rather that as vigilance wanes participants become less confident in their responses to the signal and are therefore less likely and more worried about reporting it to the experimenter. The Heeger article is particularly helpful for understanding this text as it explains Signal Detection Theory.

Heeger’s text helps facilitate the understanding of that text by explaining how though it is inevitable that some mistakes will be made in signal detection, the frequency depends on the amount of "noise." Acquiring more information makes the strength of the decision makers response stronger and that reducing "internal noise" would have a similar effect. 

The articles both do a good job posing their questions and arrive at some really novel and interesting conclusions about the nature of attention and boredom. 

In Scerbo's article I found it difficult to believe that there would be a distinction between a participant who was unaware of movement that reduced restlessness and a participant who was made aware of their movement. Nevertheless, the concept of providing a release for the participants’ restlessness is interesting to me. But I believe that there are other things that that movement can signify as well. Isn't it also possible that that "restlessness" has less to do with boredom and literally with providing some form of arousal to keep focused when the stimulus is not frequent enough? These readings made me curious about the nature of the actual perception of the stimulus. I failed to understand what made the stimuli and tasks lack luster? I was curious if the there was any satisfaction that comes from the correct identification of the stimuli and whether or not there is any way that there could be enough arousal and interest gain in a task to counteract the effects of boredom. Particularly since the point at which participants are willing to stop their involvement in an experimental task is way past the point at which they are no longer interested and way past the point at which they are interested in a task. The conclusions discussed in the "Human Factors" paper seem to offer support for the possibility that there the issue with working on a task for too long is not just boredom and disinterested but rather, possibly, that the time spent working on a task impairs the decision-making process by creating more "internal noise." This would mean that the literal cures the participants should be picking up on are still the same and have not changed, but that their ability to appropriately register them in a conscience way is diminished. 

Regardless of what the decreased performances on vigilance tasks has indicated in the past I think the varying opinions in this weeks two larger and experimental readings indicates that there is a lot of research that still needs to be done in this area. Knowing the results of decreased vigilance is just as important as knowing that vigilance decreases. Even more important is to know what the nature of that vigilance change really is. Boredom and  diminished arousal are not quite the same thing and the implications of either are quite different. 

References: 

Broadbent, Donald E, (et. al). "Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society". 1965 7:155. 
Heeger, David. "signal Detection Theory". (2003). Department of Psychology, New York UniversityScerbo, Mark W. "What's so Boring About Vigilance?".