Effect of Cue-target Onset Asynchrony (CTOA) and Cue Validity on Visual Vigilance Task Performance

The deterioration in sustaining detection performance over a time period is recognized as vigilance decrement (Warm, Parasuraman, & Matthews, 2008). It has been broadly investigated by various researchers. Numerous researchers have been advancing, to find out the core foundation of constraining the performance while the other has been interested in restraining the decrement. Studies has reported that decrement takes place within the first 15 minutes of vigilance task and as the task demand increases it may get worse. The present study is an effort to find out how cuetarget onset asynchrony (CTOA) and cue validity affects vigilance task performance. A 3 (CTOA: 100, 400 and 700 milliseconds) × 3 (Cue validity: Valid, invalid and neutral) × 4 (Time period: Four 10 minutes block) mixed factorial design with the repeated measure on last two was used. Forty-five young adults within the age range of 18 to 30 years participated in the study. A high event rate (30 trials per minute) vigilance task was used to record participant's performance. The results of the analysis of variance revealed a significant difference between the vigilance task performance among conditions (p = 0.001). The performance of the group in 400 milliseconds (ms) CTOA was better than the performance of the group with 700 ms CTOA and 100 ms CTOA.