Vigilance Test
🧠Cognitive Function | Sustained attention
🕒Duration | 10 minutes
🖥️ Devices you can use to take this task | Desktop only
🎯Output | Vigilance decrement over time in accuracy and response time & On-task motivation, fatigue and confidence
This task is designed to assess the performance decrement during sustained visual attention. A single digit (0–9) was presented at the centre of the screen for 50 ms every second. Participants were instructed to press the spacebar on their keyboard as soon as they saw ‘0’ (the target, presented randomly with a probability of 25%); no response was required for other digits. A semi-transparent jittered checkerboard pattern masked the digits, with the level of difficulty manipulated by adjusting the opacity of the mask. Pilot testing allowed us to obtain an accuracy level of ∼80% in the first minute of the experiment.
After each minute of testing, participants were asked to report their level of fatigue (‘How tired do you feel now?’) and motivation (‘How motivated do you feel?’) using a visual analogue scale.
Using this task, we found that attention declines rapidly over minutes in people who had recovered from mild COVID-19 (Zhao et al. 2022, Brain Communications).