Laboratorio de Juicios y Emociones Morales, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia.
Department of Philosophy, Providence College, Providence, Rhode Island, USA.
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci. 2024 Nov-Dec;15(6):e1693. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1693. Epub 2024 Sep 18.
Despite its importance in different occupational and everyday contexts, vigilance, typically defined as the capacity to sustain attention over time, is remarkably limited. What explains these limits? Two theories have been proposed. The Overload Theory states that being vigilant consumes limited information-processing resources; when depleted, task performance degrades. The Underload Theory states that motivation to perform vigilance tasks declines over time, thereby prompting attentional shifts and hindering performance. We highlight some conceptual and empirical problems for both theories and propose an alternative: the Strategic Allocation Theory. For the Strategic Allocation Theory, performance on vigilance tasks optimizes as a function of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, including metacognitive factors such as the expected value of effort and the expected value of planning. Limited capacities must be deployed across task sets to maximize expected reward. The observed limits of vigilance reflect changes in the perceived value of, among other things, sustaining attention to a task rather than attending to something else. Drawing from recent computational theories of cognitive control and meta-reasoning, we argue that the Strategic Allocation Theory explains more phenomena related to vigilance behavior than other theories, including self-report data. Finally, we outline some of the testable predictions the theory makes across several experimental paradigms. This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science Psychology > Attention.
尽管在不同的职业和日常环境中都很重要，但警觉——通常被定义为长时间保持注意力的能力——却惊人地有限。这些限制的原因是什么？有两种理论被提出来解释这个现象。过载理论认为，警觉需要消耗有限的信息处理资源；当这些资源被耗尽时，任务表现就会下降。低负荷理论则认为，执行警觉任务的动机随着时间的推移而下降，从而促使注意力转移，并阻碍表现。我们强调了这两种理论的一些概念和实证问题，并提出了一个替代理论：策略分配理论。对于策略分配理论，警觉任务的表现是作为内在和外在动机的函数而优化的，包括元认知因素，如努力的预期价值和计划的预期价值。必须在任务集中分配有限的能力，以最大化预期奖励。警觉的观察到的限制反映了维持对任务的注意力而不是关注其他事物的感知价值的变化。借鉴最近关于认知控制和元推理的计算理论，我们认为，与其他理论相比，策略分配理论可以解释更多与警觉行为相关的现象，包括自我报告数据。最后，我们概述了该理论在几个实验范式中可以做出的一些可测试的预测。本文属于以下分类：哲学 >认知科学基础心理学 >注意
