Indian Journal of Health and Wellbeing

Richa Singh ¹, Anurag Upadhaya ²

Affiliations
1 Department of Psychology, Vasanta Collage for Women, Varanasi, UP, IN
2 Government Inter College, Uttar Pradesh, IN

Abstract

Attention plays crucial role in our daily life activities. Variety of behavioral inefficiencies during old age may result due to age related changes in attention. Among cognitive changes which accompany healthy ageing, changes in attentional ability is the fundamental one. Vigilance performance tends to decline as the age increases. Orienting attention towards a particular location leads to better processing of information at that location thereby improving performance. Previous studies have shown improvement in vigilance performance when the paradigm of orienting was combined with vigilance. Present study examined the age difference in vigilance performance when the attention was oriented exogenously, using spatial cueing paradigm. Cues were presented at peripheral location at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 300ms. Target and non-target was the square of size 3.3 cm 3.0 cm respectively. The participant's task was to pay attention to the cue and then to make a speeded decision about the presence or absence of the target by pressing the response key. A 2 (Age Group: Young and Old) x 3 (Cue validity: valid, invalid and neutral) x 3 (Time period: 3 Blocks of 10 min. each) analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measure on last two factor. Correct detection (hits), incorrect detection (F.A.) and reaction time were recorded as performance measures. Results revealed that performance was facilitated under valid cue condition for both young and old adults. Overall detection was more for young adults while vigilance decrement was more for older adults than young adults. It further indicated qualitative difference on vigilance performances in young and old adults.

Keywords

Age Differences, Vigilance Task Performance.

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Anurag Upadhaya ¹, Richa Singh ²

Affiliations
1 Government Inter College, Uttar Pradesh, IN
2 Department of Psychology, Vasanta Collage for Women, Varanasi, U.P., IN

Abstract

The topic of vigilance behavior in today's work setting such as air traffics control (ATC), industrial quality control, sonar and radar operations etc. is gaining much importance among cognitive neuroscientists, academicians, researches as well as psychologists. Like other cognitive capacities, the capacity to sustain attention i.e. vigilance, has been considered to represent a limited resource. This is regarded as the most important determinant of the vigilance decrement. The majority of investigators report large individual differences in susceptibility to decrement. Thus, personality has been found to affect vigilance performance across time periods, besides other individual difference factors. Extraversion and introversion is the central dimension of human personality which differs from each other in terms of cortical arousal level. Researches demonstrated that introverts, who had high level of arousal, showed less decrement function than extraverts, having low activation. But in several experimental studies hypothesized of greater decrement for extraverts was not supported. Moreover, the pattern of vigilance decrement changed with the time of day. Thus, as the technical development is growing rapidly, it has become increasingly necessary to examine how vigil function changes with personality type and task demand and to understand the extent to which these changes can affect their functioning. The researches on the personality aspect, until recently, have been limited in scope while it plays important role in predicting decline reactions during vigil. The present study examined the relationship of personality and sustained task performance. The experiment was conducted on 30 students of Banaras Hindu University (M±SD=22.35year±2.55). Participants were classified as introverts (N = 15) and extraverts (N = 15) based on their EPQ-R score. Performances in terms of correct and incorrect detection were collected.

Keywords

Vigilance, Vigilance Decrement, Individual difference.

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