Relationship of Event-Related Potentials to the Vigilance Decrement

Abstract

Cognitive fatigue emerges in wide-ranging tasks and domains, but traditional vigilance tasks provide a well-studied context in which to explore the mechanisms underlying it. Though a variety of experimental methodologies have been used to investigate cognitive fatigue in vigilance, relatively little research has utilized electroencephalography (EEG), specifically event-related potentials (ERPs), to explore the nature of cognitive fatigue, also known as the vigilance decrement. Moreover, much of the research that has been done on vigilance and ERPs uses non-traditional vigilance paradigms, limiting generalizability to the established body of behavioral results and corresponding theories. In this study, we address concerns with prior research by (1) investigating the vigilance decrement using a well-established visual vigilance task, (2) utilizing a task designed to attenuate possible confounding ERP components present within a vigilance paradigm, and (3) informing our interpretations with recent findings from ERP research. We averaged data across electrodes located over the frontal, central, and parietal scalp. Then, we generated waveforms locked to the onset of critical low-frequency or non-critical high-frequency events during a 40 min task that was segregated into time blocks for data analysis. There were three primary findings from the analyses of these data. First, mean amplitude of N1 was greater during later blocks for both low-frequency and high-frequency events, a contradictory finding compared to past visual vigilance studies that is further discussed with respect to current interpretations of the N1 in visual attention tasks. Second, P3b mean amplitude following low-frequency events was reduced during later blocks, with a later onset latency. Third and finally, the decrease in P3b amplitude correlated with individual differences in the magnitude of the vigilance decrement, assessed using d′. The results provide evidence for degradations of cognitive processing efficiency brought on by extended time on task, leading to delayed processing and decreased discriminability of critical stimuli from non-critical stimuli. These conclusions are discussed in the context of the vigilance decrement and corresponding theoretical accounts.

Neurophysiological Vigilance Characterisation and Assessment: Laboratory and Realistic Validations Involving Professional Air Traffic Controllers

“…The analyses of the reaction times (RTs) ( Figure 3) revealed an increase with time on task and significant differences (p = 0.01 for PVT 1 and p = 0.0017 for PVT 2 ) between the first (PVT 1 1 , PVT 1 2 -high vigilance conditions) and the ninth minutes (PVT 9 1 , PVT 9 2 -low vigilance conditions) of the PVTs. The result was confirmed by experimental evidences in literature, and in fact, as expected, a decreasing in vigilance was related to increasing of RTs with time on task [9,18,21,76,[80][81][82]. The comparison of the EEG PSDs between such High and Low Vigilance conditions of PVT 1 highlighted that the parietal alpha, frontal beta and frontal gamma EEG rhythms could be the most significant features to assess vigilance changes over time.…”

“…The need to remain alert and situation-aware, and to detect infrequent but critical signals is crucial in a lot of job occupations: A vigilance failure in any of these domains could have dramatic impacts. An extensive literature review revealed that vigilance performance is fragile on a given simulation source or task; the most common ubiquitous finding in vigilance research is that detection performance declines over time, and this decline is called vigilance decrement [18][19][20][21][22]. A study has shown that target detection performance decreases by 15% in 30 min during a monotonous task [23].…”

Electroencephalographic and skin temperature indices of vigilance and inhibitory control

“…They observed increased N1 amplitudes over time during a simulated radar task, followed by decreased P3 amplitudes. The N1 effect was interpreted as an increase in compensatory effort to remain attentive across time (Haubert et al, 2018). These authors, however, observed the increase of N1 amplitudes at a different scalp distribution (frontal and central sites), and therefore could reflect different neural or cognitive correlates.…”

Brain Connectivity Analysis Under Semantic Vigilance and Enhanced Mental States

“…EEG is the most popularly used technique for vigilance estimation due to its portability, high temporal resolution, low-cost properties, and low constraints on participants' behavioral performance. The EEG oscillations classified by their frequencies have the following approximate ranges: (1-4) Hz for delta, (4-8) Hz for theta, (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13) Hz for alpha, (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30) Hz for beta and higher than 30 Hz for gamma. It has been suggested that these frequency ranges could be individually determined by a precise procedure involving the detection of the alpha peak, also known as Individual Alpha Frequency [26].…”