Smit Annika S, Eling Paul A T M, Coenen Anton M L
NICI/Department of Biological Psychology, Montessorilaan 3, P.O. Box 9104, University of Nijmegen, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2004 Jan;115(1):35-42. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2003.11.001.
The resource view on vigilance performance was tested. First, a low demanding task was compared with a similar low demanding task in which stimulus presentation was less monotonous due to added, irrelevant, stimuli. The resource view, maintaining that vigilance is lowered by hard mental work, predicts that addition of irrelevant stimuli will not affect performance. The classic arousal theory, however, states that arousal drops due to monotonous stimulus presentation and predicts that decreasing monotony will enhance performance. Results showed that performance was unaffected by added stimuli. Second, we tested whether a high-demanding task (with identical stimulus presentation as the low demanding task, but different instruction) would cause a greater decline in performance than the low demanding task. Indeed, in the high-demanding task performance was affected most. In sum, it appears that vigilance decreases due to hard mental work, which requires many resources. Both overall performance and decrement in performance can be explained in terms of resources, and this suggests that vigilance tasks should be resource-demanding tasks, which do not have to be of long duration.
对警觉表现的资源观点进行了测试。首先，将一项低要求任务与一项类似的低要求任务进行比较，在后一项任务中，由于添加了无关刺激，刺激呈现的单调性降低。资源观点认为，艰苦的脑力劳动会降低警觉性，预测添加无关刺激不会影响表现。然而，经典的唤醒理论指出，单调的刺激呈现会导致唤醒水平下降，并预测减少单调性会提高表现。结果表明，添加刺激对表现没有影响。其次，我们测试了一项高要求任务（与低要求任务的刺激呈现相同，但指令不同）是否会比低要求任务导致更大的表现下降。事实上，在高要求任务中，表现受到的影响最大。总之，似乎艰苦的脑力劳动会降低警觉性，因为它需要大量资源。整体表现和表现下降都可以用资源来解释，这表明警觉任务应该是需要资源的任务，不一定需要很长时间。
