Thought-probes-in-Vigilance
Sustained attention or vigilance is the ability to perform a task for an extended period of time. When performing a prolonged task, as time-on-task passes, vigilance tends to decrease, a phenomenon scientifically known as the vigilance decrement.
Although several theories have been developed to explain the vigilance decrement, there is still an open debate concerning the mechanisms that lead a progressive loss of vigilance. On the one hand, the resource depletion hypothesis holds that attention works through limited resources and that vigilance tasks are difficult to perform, so that when performing prolonged tasks resources are progressively depleted over time and vigilance decreases (Caggiano & Parasuraman, 2004; Warm, Dember, & Hancock, 1996) On the other hand, the mind-wandering hypothesis holds that vigilance tasks are monotonous and boring, causing attentional resources to wander from the task at hand towards task-irrelevant-thoughts, making difficult to maintain attention in the task and therefore resulting in decreased vigilance (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006).
We conducted a preliminary experiment incorporating measures of mind wandering (MW), i.e., thought probes (TP), in the ANTI-Vea task. We conducted a study in which different amounts of TP were tested between-participants across groups to determine the optimal TP rate.