Our Current Research
- The study of individual differences as they relate to performance, workload, and stress associated with performing vigilance tasks.
- The role of the environmental factors (e.g., social context, background noise) in relation to human performance, workload, and stress.
- The impacts of social media and other technologies on human performance and stress.
- Training for vigilance tasks, including air traffic controllers, baggage screening, threat detection, and military applications.
What is Vigilance?
Vigilance generally involves boring people to death to see how well they pay attention. In more scientific terms, vigilance is commonly defined as the ability to sustain attention for extended periods of time to monitor for and respond to infrequently occurring signals. Real-world examples of vigilance tasks include security screening and long-distance driving. Performance on vigilance tasks generally declines over time, a phenomena known as the “vigilance decrement”. Meanwhile, operator stress and workload tend to increase. One of the goals of our lab’s research is to better understand the cognitive mechanisms driving this decrement.
What are Individual Differences?
Individual differences is the study of how and why people vary in across psychological characteristics. Examples might include personality, cognitive ability, age, and gender. Our research specifically explores how individual differences impact human performance and stress.