Sustained attention in operational settings

Introduction: Laboratory and Operational Settings for Sustained Attention Research In this chapter we consider sustained attention in field or operational settings, contrasting this with the majority of research, which is laboratory based. Significant and practical differences emerge, providing guidance on how to (and even whether to) generalize features of operational settings in order to study sustained attention in the laboratory. It is worthwhile to remember that the study of vigilance started from a practical problem: how radar operators on antisubmarine patrols could maintain vigilance for extended periods of patrol (e.g., Hoffman and Militello, 2008). The problem of what we have since called the vigilance decrement was discovered using the operations research techniques of geographic plotting of U-boat sightings and quickly abstracted to laboratory experiments by Norman H. Mackworth (summarized in Mackworth, 1948, and extended to include visual search aspects by Mackworth, Llewellyn-Thomas, and Holmquist, 1958). Thus from the beginning, we have had an interplay between operational settings and laboratory studies, each attempting to illuminate the problem by somewhat different methods. This idea that laboratory and i eld research should be complementary has been proposed many times in the philosophy of science (including philosophy of psychology) and was popularized recently by Stokes’s (1997) thesis that theory and practice together should drive innovation. For Stokes (1997), the concept of theory and practice being at two ends of a single continuum is rejected in favor of two separate dimensions: understanding and utility.